Samsung Note 8 beats iPhone 8 in speed test

A fixed set of 16 apps were opened in two laps on a device

Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 has certainly been hitting the headlines for all the right reasons unlike its predecessor and there is another positive development.

According to a YouTuber’s speed test, the Note 8 turned out to be faster than the iPhone 8.

Though speed tests aren’t really the most scientific way to evaluate the performance of a device, it certainly gives a sense of how the device might perform. They are a way to put synthetic benchmark results into practice, in a way, and yet the outcome can be very surprising, like in this case.



The A11 Bionic chip aboard the iPhone 8 (and iPhone 8 Plus) is certainly a monstrously powerful system-on-a-chip (SoC), capable of beating even desktop-class computers such as Apple’s own MacBook Pro.

David Rahimi, the man behind the YouTube test, has been making speed test videos for years now, using a rather straightforward process to rank smartphone speeds. Under the test, a fixed set of 16 apps are opened in two laps on a device, ranging from light programmes like Calendar and Settings to more graphics-intensive tasks, like games and a Photoshop image export.

iPhone has had a good record in past tests— save for the one with the OnePlus 5 — beating most top-rated Android phones by a wide margin. Apple’s tight hardware and software integration has always been one of its biggest strengths; and the A11 Bionic was expected to be no different.

After initially losing the first lap by a few seconds, the Galaxy Note 8 was able to pick things up again and ultimately close in on the iPhone a full six seconds earlier.

Interestingly, the Note 8 used in the test was powered by the Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835, a chip that is almost a year old, rather than Samsungs own Exynos SoC.



iOS 11, in particular, put much emphasis on certain design tweaks, and now has new and exciting yet somewhat slow app-opening animations. The Galaxy Note 8's TouchWiz software, on the other hand, makes transitions faster.

Although such differences may not really pop up in real life usage, Note 8’s 6GB of RAM and its internal components still matter, independently of how a manufacturer fine-tunes them.