Exclusive: Qualcomm-Powered Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-i9500 Performance Revealed

On March 14th, 2013 executives of Samsung Mobile will gather with select members of the international media in New York City to unveil the successor of the Samsung Galaxy SIII. Thanks to Power Board, we now know what the performance is.

Last year, we broke the story about Samsung Galaxy SIII and its relatively disappointing performance in the world version of the phone. Even though this was one of first quad-core phones to arrive on the market, we were unpleasantly surprised to see that the Exynos 4412 SoC inside the GT-I9300 (Galaxy SIII) featured Mali-400T series graphics processor. Needless to say, we had a fair number of sites and readers that did not believe the results, and the rest is history.

Less than a year has passed and we’re at another crossroad, weeks before Samsung Mobile officially unveils the GT-I9500, the Samsung Galaxy SIV. Knowing that the 2012 model fought the battle against Apple iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 and won, this year the competition will be stronger than ever. Both the iPhone 5S and iPhone 6 will fight against the Galaxy SIV and Galaxy SIV Mini and the company made sure they will offer a compelling level of performance.

The recently rumored specs of the Galaxy S IV were found to be so untrue that Samsung Mobile requested the sammobile.com blog to take the story down, but not before Google was able to cache the page.

The alleged specs are as follows:
-4.99″ Full-HD SoLux by Samsung Display (AMOLED is out)
-Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 1.9 GHz (Exynos 5 is out)
-2 GB RAM LPDDR3
-16, 32 or 64 GB
-13 Megapixel CMOS Camera
-140.1 x 71.8 x 7.7mm
-138 grams
-Home button with touch buttons
-Plastic back with aluminum sides
-Removable battery

Now, the big question is how well will this Smartphone perform? Thanks to Power Board, an excellent online database from Rightware, we managed to find out. By accident, as it happens. We were running Browsermark 2.0 on several new devices which we are reviewing, when we stumbled upon Browsermark 2.0 results for the GT-I9500. This is an internal designation for the international version of Samsung Galaxy SIV phone. The phone was running Mobile Chrome Beta 25 (25.0.1364.122), achieving a great result of 2710. This is higher than my Acer Ultrabook powered by an Intel Core i7 dual-core ULV processor (2438), and better than the previous generation SIII. In this test, our Samsung Galaxy SIII (US Version, Powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960) achieved a score of 1969. We also decided to include a comparison against some of the most recent Android phones we’ve tested (below).

We then started browsing through Power Board in order to check other Rightware benchmarks but this was the only trace of the GT-I9500. Still, it is a lot of performance coming from a cellphone, this time with significantly higher resolution (1920×1080 on GT-I9500 vs. 1280×720 on GT-I9300). We’re hoping that more benchmarks will leak out in the coming weeks as we’re still almost 2 weeks away from the official launch in New York.

Original Author: Theo Valich

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