ISSUE 73 • ANDROID ADVISOR 23and gaming are fantastically smooth, well worth the
serious hit to battery life when it’s switched on.
When pitted against the Pixel 4’s 90Hz Smooth
Display, however, the difference is not nearly as
obvious. Samsung could easily have gotten away with
90Hz, saved some battery life and offered it for 1440p
resolution as well, but as it stands the 120Hz setting
is available only with Full HD 1080p resolution. Fast
refresh with WQHD would have been nice, especially
on a screen this size – I’m holding out hope that
Samsung will unlock it with a future update. Despite
that limitation, however, the 120Hz screen is one of
the best reasons to buy any S20 phone.
Speed to spare
Galaxy phones have been fast enough since the
Snapdragon 820 processor in the Galaxy S7, but the
Snapdragon 865 in the S20 line is on another level.
Snapdragon 855 Plus-powered phones had already
broken the 10,000 threshold on the PCMark Work
2.0 benchmark, the S20 crushes expectations with a
score of 12,350. While the speed boost is palpable,
Qualcomm doesn’t deserve all of the credit. Samsung
is using entirely new RAM modules inside the S20, and
every handset is packed with at least 12GB of LPDDR5
memory. Plus you’re able to keep three apps open
for faster switching, so launching games with lengthy
startup times are lightning-quick. To give you an idea
of how it feels to have this much RAM: I stopped
counting the apps on my Recents screen at 50.
Even the SSD has improved. It’s not just the 128GB
capacity – once again, twice as much as the Pixel and