Performance: Snapdragon 800 for Windows Telephone

For the get-go time we're seeing a Windows Phone powered by a Snapdragon 800 SoC, which is currently the most powerful SoC that Qualcomm makes and a popular ane with a range of manufacturers. I've had a lot of experience with this particular chip, the MSM8974, in the past few Android flagships that I've reviewed, and it's definitely delivers a great deal of power to the user.

The Snapdragon 800 consists of a two.26 GHz quad-core Krait 400 CPU, Adreno 330 GPU clocked at 450 MHz, a Hexagon QDSP6V5A DSP at 600 MHz, a dual-channel LPDDR3 controller capable of providing 12.viii GB/s of throughput, Category 4 LTE, upward to Wi-Fi 802.11ac, Bluetooth 4.0, IZAT Gen8B GPS and dual epitome signal processors. As you can see, information technology provides the majority of the Lumia 1520'south backbone on the one dice, especially when because the packet-on-package ii GB of RAM that's included.

The Lumia 1520 also comes with NFC as provided by a secondary scrap, equally well equally 32 GB of internal NAND complemented past a microSD card slot. Another slot is provided for the SIM card, which curiously is a nano-SIM rather than the micro-SIM that the smartphone customs has been accustomed to in all phones bar the iPhone.

In the past, Windows Telephone has proven itself to exist an extremely optimized operating system, on hardware ranging from the depression cease Snapdragon S4 MSM8227 in the Lumia 520, to the MSM8960 that nosotros saw in the Lumia 925 and Lumia 1020. However the Snapdragon 800 is a good deal more powerful than any of the SoCs nosotros've seen in a Windows Phone earlier, making the performance of the Lumia 1520 especially interesting.

As y'all might expect, the overall system performance of the Lumia 1520 is very proficient. Everything from loading apps and using the camera, to browsing through the interface and changing settings is incredibly fast. Animations are besides very fluid, which is expected from the powerful Adreno 330 GPU that accelerates all aspects of Windows Phone. Merely information technology's not the fastest smartphone that I've used.

Like to iOS 7 on the iPhone 5s, information technology'due south actually the operating system itself that makes the Lumia 1520 seem slower in comparison to tiptop-end Android devices, despite its speediness compared to older Windows Phones. Where flagship handsets similar the Nexus 5 load applications instantly, thanks to minimal apply of animations in Android, Windows Phone is jam-packed with animations throughout every aspect of the operating organization. When using the Lumia 1520, it feels like tasks are being completed on the powerful Krait 400 CPU cores well before the transitional animations are complete, giving an illusion that the device is slower because content isn't displayed as rapidly.

Unlike iOS seven, there is no 'Reduce Motility' setting to shorten the length of animations, or whatsoever setting to turn them off, and then at that place is no way to truly evangelize the full potential of such a powerful SoC while navigating the operating system. Of form apps are another story, as the actress grunt allows webpage manipulation to be faster than ever before; multitasking has also received a speed bump, both from the inclusion of 2 GB of RAM and the Snapdragon 800.

Gaming is a whole other story, considering until now at that place hasn't been a GPU in a Windows Phone that's as powerful as this. Previously we've had the Adreno 225 delivering graphics power to Windows Phone handsets, but the footstep up to the Adreno 330 is huge: the Snapdragon 800 SoC delivers three times (if not four times) the GPU performance of the previous MSM8960. This means that fifty-fifty because the spring from 720p to 1080p displays - 2.25x more than pixels to render to – the Adreno 330 is a more capable GPU that gives developers more room to piece of work with.

I tried a range of titles from the Windows Phone Store and naturally all of them performed extremely well on the Lumia 1520. Non only is gaming dandy on the six-inch display, but the Adreno 330 keeps everything shine and fluid, no matter what championship you lot're playing. Information technology will too be great for major upcoming titles such every bit G Theft Auto: San Andreas, which are certain to crave a bit of grunt to run smoothly on 1080p displays.

Moving on to the benchmarks and information technology's interesting to run across how the Lumia 1520 performs in browser benchmarks versus some other peak-stop Snapdragon 800-powered Android handsets. Windows Phones accept typically posted unimpressive scores in Futuremark's Peacekeeper benchmark, and the Lumia 1520 is no exception: it may exist 53% faster than the Lumia 1020, only it's still 45% lower than the Galaxy Note three.

To confirm that Internet Explorer 11 on Windows Telephone 8 is in fact slower than Chrome/Android browser, I also ran Mozilla's intense Kraken benchmark on a range of smartphones. Hither the performance gap is even more pronounced, with the Galaxy Notation 3 completing the benchmark more than 3 times faster. I wouldn't say this departure entirely translates to real-globe experiences, but it does experience like the Lumia 1520 has a slower web browser than leading Android smartphones.

WPBench, an all-round Windows Telephone only benchmark, shows but how fast the Snapdragon 800 is in comparison to some older handsets. The Lumia 1520 is 116% faster in this test than the Lumia 120, which goes to show how more (and faster) CPU cores, a better GPU and more than retentiveness bandwidth can boost performance significantly.

Like with most devices of this grade, yous're given top-end connectivity options that role perfectly. I had no problem connecting to Optus' LTE network in Australia, achieving speeds upwards of xxx Mbps in good coverage areas. Wi-Fi functioned perfectly for me as well, beingness able to connect to both my 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz 802.11n networks (802.11ac is also available) with niggling effort. I also establish no issues with Bluetooth, GPS or NFC during my testing, although NFC yet struggles in transfers to Android devices.

The Snapdragon 800 SoC is capable of 4K encoding and decoding, but information technology appears as though Windows Phone 8 currently lacks back up for this capability. The Music+Videos Hub in Windows Phone recognizes and can play back Ultra HD videos, just it stutters significantly as if decoding was occurring on the CPU rather than accelerated with the help of the Hexagon DSP. This isn't much of an issue right now, but the emergence of 4K content in the side by side few years volition brand this a more than critical feature.

Overall the performance of the Lumia 1520 doesn't disappoint, easily cementing itself as the fastest Windows Phone available with the best range of hardware, including Wi-Fi 802.11ac, LTE Category iv, 2 GB of RAM and a microSD card slot. Information technology doesn't quite lucifer Android devices with similar specifications, but information technology keeps Windows Telephone right upward there with the rest.