50 ANDROID ADVISOR • ISSUE 66BUYING GUIDE
to the 7 Pro – two areas where the company has
never previously made a name for itself, no doubt
not by chance.
Still, it hasn’t exactly skimped elsewhere. The
processor is the flagship Snapdragon 855, and it’s
backed up by some meaty memory options, with
up to 256GB storage and 12GB of RAM available
– though there’s no support for microSD cards,
so what you get is what you get.
That storage is special, too: the 7 Pro uses UFS
3.0 – universal flash storage – which is a fancy way of
saying that it should be able to save and access files
much quicker. That means faster app opening, game
loading, and file transferring – it’s the equivalent to
plugging an SSD into your computer. It’s also the only
phone on sale right now to boast the tech, though
technically not the first – the Galaxy Fold uses UFS 3.0
too, but we all know how well that launch went. It’s
not clear yet how much of a difference the new drive
is making in and of itself, but it’s contributing to silky
smooth performance across the board.
I’ve been testing the 12GB RAM, 256GB storage
model, and unsurprisingly all that power has seen it
sail through most of our benchmarks, with results up
there with flagship rivals – though not blowing them
away, and surprisingly it drops below the 6T on some
ofthegraphicaltests,wheretheextraRAMdoesn’t
reallycontribute.Thisis onpre‑release software
though, which can complicate things, and I’d expect
software updates to refine the hardware performance.
Either way, this thing is fast, and it’s at the point
where it’s so fast that minor variations in individual