Samsung Epic 4G Review: The Fastest Android Phone
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 6, 2010 5:28 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Samsung
- Epic 4G
- Gadgets
- Mobile
Battery Life
The first 4G phone we reviewed, the EVO 4G, didn’t do so well in our battery life tests. I’m sorry to say that the Epic 4G is even worse.
Other than our WiFi web browsing test, I wasn’t able to get more than 4.5 hours out of the Epic 4G. Adding insult to injury, our web browsing battery life test showed worse battery life while operating on a 3G network vs. a 4G network (while stationary). I double and triple checked the numbers, and each time I got better battery life on 4G than I did on 3G.
The Epic 4G has a beefy 1500 mAh battery and thankfully it’s removable, but battery life just isn’t a strong point of this phone. I’m not sure whether it’s Samsung dropping the ball on the software optimization side or if the power management on Hummingbird is just that bad.
Perhaps it’s Sprint related? After all, the EVO 4G had terrible battery life as well.
There are just too many variables to narrow it down. The bottom line? While the Epic 4G performs better than any other Android phone I’ve used, its battery life is among the worst.
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Ethaniel - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
I have also noticed that all Android phones out there do some kind of "breakdancing". You think it has something to do with Android, but I think it has something to do with Java. Now, Java devs will probably want to eat my brain after this... but Java sucks. Big time. Making Android's UI based on Java was a bad, bad, really bad move. About four three time slower than C++, it demands more memory... completely inadequate for a mobile environment.meatless - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
It's sad, the prevalence of Java FUD to this day. It's also bad to blame Java (the syntax), as you are unnecessarily conflating the Dalvik VM with desktop VMs such as Sun's.C++ is fast, sure, but there is a lot more to designing a platform than speed, and the Dalvik VM is more than fast enough. iOS's Obj-C implementation is also not C++ fast, but who complains?
taltamir - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - link
1. both Javas are shit2. There is more to a platform then speed... but when you are designing a platform starved for processing power and that needs to sip electricity then it makes a huge difference.
Penti - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - link
Most of the platform are actually C/C++ libraries and programs, where you glue your app in isn't that relevant. You need a framework for any mobile phone platform, but the resources that framework glues into thats where a lot of performance comes from and it's in C/C++. It's better to have an accelerated framework running on a virtual machine then an unaccelerated C++ one. Rendering of menus and such would be slower on the last one. Besides on Symbian it's QT-framework that rules now, not some ultra customized embedded framework. Memory requirements have gone up there too, but capacity have grown even more. Besides nobody wanted to write mobile apps to some badly designed and awkward C++ framework and API. Java syntax was a good choice therefor.taltamir - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
the fact that there are more considerations than just programming language when it comes to power and speed are obvious, as is that you could make a java app thats faster than a C++ app.Neither make java a good choice.
BTW, I didn't personally comment about the issue of jerkiness, I was going on a tangent as a reply to what meatless said (specifically the socalled "java FUD")
zizagoo - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
It's an Android problem. The cause of the "jerkiness" is that unlike iOS/WebOS/WP7, Android doesn't have a gpu accelerated ui. They supposedly did this because the G1 wouldn't support it at the time.http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=...
Gingerbread, which is supposedly showcased next month, should fix this.
deputc26 - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
Thankyou! this is exactly it, give the man a medal. I don't know why Anandtech never mentions this. It should be ubiquitous knowledge in the android community.meatless - Monday, September 6, 2010 - link
Also, the 3-4X speed difference on non-mobile platforms is greatly exaggerated. I always find http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/ a fun and FUD-free site.Iksy - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - link
Greatly exagerated? That site shows a 2.3x speed difference and it's comparring against Sun's fastest most optimizing version against g++. The unoptimized version is over 20x slower, you'll find it near the bottom of the list for compares. I do find it interesting that while they're satisfied with using an open source C (gnu) compiler, they do not include the open source java interpreter. They also do not include the Intel C compiler, even though they easily could and include the Intel Fortran compiler.In other words, is still in the ball park so say Java is 3-4x slower than the equivalent c++ code.
dvinnen - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - link
Wait, so the Java syntax is what is slowing down Android? Because it doesn't run Java, it runs Dalvik.I would also like to see evidence that C++ is 4 times faster. Not saying Java is faster but it is fast enough. I say that as a Java developer who doesn't like the language and would rather use slower languages like Python