For this week, at least, the Samsung Galaxy S10+ is the fastest Android phone on the market. The S10+, currently on pre-order with a shelf date of March 8, is the first US phone we've seen with Qualcomm's Snapdragon 855 processor, which we discovered last month is significantly faster than the Snapdragon 845 in last year's Android flagships.
(Earlier this week, Xiaomi announced the Mi 9, a Snapdragon 855-based phone that will never come to the US, so it isn't competitively relevant here.)
At least on benchmarks, it looks like Samsung hasn't damaged the 855's performance. The Galaxy S10+ (we tested an 8GB RAM/128GB storage unit) benchmarked almost exactly like the 855 reference device all around, and better than the 855 reference device on PCMark, which uses some older APIs that Qualcomm warned me that the reference device didn't support.
That means a 40 percent jump in single-core Geekbench scores over the Galaxy S9, and a 20 percent improvement in GFXBench graphics frame rates. The 855's performance on cross-platform benchmarks is about on par with Apple's A12 processor, featured in the current iPhone lineup.
The Galaxy S10 and S10e also have the same processor as the S10+, so I expect similar benchmark results. Benchmark numbers didn't vary much if I changed the screen resolution on the S10+.
Of course, benchmarks don't tell the story of long-term performance, which makes me a little nervous. The S10+ isn't running stock Android 9.0; it has Samsung's One UI overlay, and Samsung's software in the past has sometimes slowed phones down or consumed battery life with time. That's something I'll need to check out with further use.
I'm also looking forward to testing two other big features in the S10+: its Qualcomm X24 LTE modem and its Broadcom Wi-Fi 6 chipset. When paired with a Wi-Fi 6 router, of which there aren't that many yet, the S10+ should get much faster speeds on 2.4GHz Wi-Fi.
I did a few speed tests on T-Mobile with the S10+ in Queens, NY compared with a Google Pixel 3 with last year's Qualcomm X20 modem, and the preliminary results were encouraging—in very good conditions, I saw speeds of 166-185Mbps down as opposed to 143-165Mbps down on the Pixel 3. That's not definitive, though, so I'm going to wait to do many more speed tests before determining if I can really tell the difference. The X24 supports up to 2Gbps speeds using 7-carrier aggregation and 20 data streams, in theory, but no US carrier has a network (that I know of) that can handle those speeds.
Not all Galaxy S10+ models will have the Snapdragon 855. Galaxy phones sold outside the Americas, China, and Japan typically have a Samsung processor; this year, it's the Exynos 9820. Exynos processors tend to benchmark a bit better than the Snapdragon on CPU benchmarks, but those models aren't properly tuned for US networks, and the Snapdragon devices still perform very well.
While the Galaxy S10+ is the first Snapdragon 855 phone we're seeing for the US, I expect to see many more in the next few days. The upcoming LG G8 and V50, as well as phones from Nokia, Sony, and ZTE might show up at Mobile World Congress with Snapdragon 855 chipsets.
We'll have more Galaxy S10+ coverage in the coming days, so check back soon.