[Swordmaker]

I dunno, Consumer Reports has not generally been kind to Apple either. If Swordmaker is moonlighting at CR, he's not exactly doing a bang-up job. :-)

Consumer Reports just came out on October 16th with a list of five "best" smartphones where they listed the Samsung Galaxy S8, S8 Plus, and the Galaxy S7 and "better in performance than the two new iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 plus" . . . and then hid the actual article behind a paywall, where you had to subscribe to Consumer Reports. A news article in a South Korean Tech journal Yonhap, with the FUD headline of "Samsung's Galaxy S8 tops U.S. consumer review", which picked that up and crowed that even last year's Samung Galaxy S7 was faster in performance than Apple's New iPhone 8 citing Consumer Reports as a source, then the US's BGR tech journal, quoting the South Korean magazine, repeated the claim with a FUD headline "Consumer Reports says old Samsung phones are better than Apple’s brand new iPhone 8."

Neither of those two actually linked to the CR article. When you go to CR, and read between the lines, and parse what they were saying about phones that last between charges,

It turns out the ONLY "performance" Consumer Reports was reporting on was relative battery life performance, not actual phone speed or any other test of actual phone processor or GPU performance. LOL! They're listing purely battery life specs. Oops.

[dayglored]

> It turns out the ONLY "performance" Consumer Reports was reporting on was relative battery life performance, not actual phone speed or any other test of actual phone processor or GPU performance.

"Let's see, of all the ratings, which one shows the Galaxy beating the iPhone? Battery life? Okay, then, we'll publish that one."

No agenda there, no bias there, oh no. Couldn't be.

Sheesh.

So did CR set the display brightness the same for that comparison? Screen brightness affects current drain considerably. And current draw in modern semiconductors is almost directly related to how many internal capacitances are being charged and discharged per second as the "ones" and "zeros" change around. (There's negligible static current consumption.) So one has to also be careful about what applications one is running, including background ones. Any active process will be drawing current proportional to its CPU/GPU usage.

So is the iPhone CPU/GPU performance better than the Galaxy's? If so, all else equal, it's gonna draw more current because it's manipulating more data per unit time. "Smart" monitoring and control of power consumption can do a lot to mitigate that, of course; such as slowing down when waiting for the user to do something, etc. Standard stuff in battery powered devices.