The "Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders" vs ROG5 Preview: Branded vs Original
by Andrei Frumusanu on August 16, 2021 10:00 AM ESTBattery Life - A Horrible Downgrade
Battery life for the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders is interesting for one fact alone: Qualcomm and ASUS’ decision to equip the device with a much smaller 4000mAh battery. While that figure alone isn’t particularly small for a regular device, the industry has seen steadily growing battery capacities over the years. 4000mAh is actually the same size battery that ASUS is employing in the small form-factor Zenfone 8, and the ROG Phone 5 has a massive 6000mAh unit, so naturally we’re expecting quite a massive difference in the battery performance.
As expected, the 60Hz web browsing scores of the SSI are just horrible and massively disappointing. At 10.38 hours runtime, this is only 62% of the battery life presented by the ROG Phone 5 under the same test conditions. The SSI’s battery is 66% of the sibling device’s size, and the further difference could be explained by the more aggressive performance characteristics of the SSI.
At 120Hz, which I opted for instead of the 144Hz maximum of the phone just for apples-to-apples purposes, the device ended up as the shortest lasting high refresh phone we’ve recently tested. At only 60.9% of the ROG Phone 5’s battery life, we’re seeing two polar opposites in terms of the runtime in our chart.
In PCMark, it’s again the same story. Besides the Exynos 2100 regular small S21, the Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders ends up as the worst performing device in recent testing.
Overall, the SSI is just a perplexing phone. For the little weight difference and 0.4mm thickness differences, we’re getting a phone that’s really only less than two-thirds of the ROG Phone 5 when it comes to the battery life. This puts it amongst one of the worst performing Snapdragon 888 devices on the market when it comes to battery life, which is abysmal.
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shabby - Monday, August 16, 2021 - link
Lol at the battery life, utter junkGreat_Scott - Monday, August 16, 2021 - link
It's a worse phone for more money. Which is surprisingly common.tom-fox-29 - Thursday, September 9, 2021 - link
Rightjamesb2147 - Monday, August 16, 2021 - link
Savage.This is why I read AnandTech!
Moizy - Monday, August 16, 2021 - link
+1warreo - Tuesday, August 17, 2021 - link
+2. I love Andrei's writing. He is not always right, and he can be overly defensive/confrontational, but I respect that he takes a view and makes the effort to be data driven instead of the "always neutral, don't write anything negative" stuff that is the norm everywhere else. At least he advances the discussion even if you disagree with him.Andrei Frumusanu - Wednesday, August 18, 2021 - link
As you say I write based on data or facts, so I'd like to hear what you say I'm not "right" on.melgross - Monday, August 16, 2021 - link
It’s a wonder how companies can put a device out like this. Did they even try it out?We’ll have to see what the camera software updates bring, but if anyone is actually interested in this, I can only tell them to not buy something on promises of future upgrades. That’s something this site also says. Maybe those updates will result in a seriously improved camera system, but maybe not. I would have preferred at least a preliminary testing suite to see if those updates do what Qualcomm claims. But since that wasn’t done, we won’t know.
BedfordTim - Tuesday, August 17, 2021 - link
I wonder if it was meant to be a low volume subsidised device for them to experiment with, but someone in management failed to understand.DanNeely - Monday, August 16, 2021 - link
Does "3x optical zoom, 80mm eq." mean an 27-80mm equivalent zoom, or 80-240mm equivalent zoom? The former would start the optical zoom at roughly the same point; but you'd be dropping from 64 to 8MP directly. The latter would start at roughly where the main sensor would be with just taking an 8MP area in the center of the sensor for a "zoom by crop" effect; so both interpretations seem plausible.