Battery Life Comparison Between Exynos & Snapdragon Galaxy S10+: Choose Exynos If You're A Web Addict

When it comes to a flagship smartphone, people are often concerned with its size and specifications. However, not everyone is a gamer with the needs for the most powerful CPU and GPU and the biggest screen. The user experience of a flagship needs to balance the performance and its battery life.

The battery life of the Galaxy S10+ is still considered top of the list compared to other flagship devices. A larger battery, a more efficient screen, and a new generation SoC will definitely bring significant improvements in battery life compared to last year's Galaxy S9. However, the Galaxy S10+ comes with two different versions with different processors, the Snapdragon 855 and Exynos 9820, so which version will provide better battery life for everyday tasks?

The AnandTech site ran both processor versions of this smartphone with the highest conditions to compare their battery life. This means that the screen resolution is set at 1440p resolution and the battery is set to "Performance" mode.

The results are amazing.

Results of the battery life test when surfing the web with Wi-Fi for both Galaxy S10+ versions

Testing with Wi-Fi, both versions of galaxy S10+ show excellent battery life. However, while the Snapdragon version ended the test with 12.75 hours (12 hours and 45 minutes), the Exynos version also had a longer duration, up to 13.08 hours (13 hours 5 minutes).

This was a surprise result for Anandtech when in other tests, they once stated that Exynos 9820 was less effective than Snapdragon 855 in terms of performance. Therefore, they did not think Exynos could catch up to Snapdragon, not to mention, defeat the processor with such a significant gap.

However, in the overall battery life test of PCMark Work 2.0, the Galaxy S10+ failed to maintain its performance as in the test of web surfing. Anyway, these are very impressive stats, and you can see that the two versions of the processor have nearly the same battery life. This time, the Snapdragon 855 version has slightly better battery life than Exynos 9820.

To explain these results, it should be noted that the Exynos version has a lower performance than Snapdragon, so it will spend more resources on heavier tasks.

Meanwhile, Exynos 9820's low-performance Cortex-A55 cores actually use less energy than the Snapdragon 855 in tasks with very low workloads. This gap is about 20-30 mW but can increase to higher values for heavier average workloads.

Furthermore, one of the most significant improvements on the Galaxy S10 compared to previous devices is not necessarily in the SoC or the larger battery. In fact, it's the device's screen that is the most energy-consuming part. In flight mode, the energy consumption of galaxy S10+ is nearly 100 mW lower than the Galaxy S9+. This is a great improvement in battery life especially when the S10+ also has a screen bigger than the S9+.

Currently, some galaxy S10+ Exynos versions are having problems due to mistakenly switching to a low-power state after making a voice call in any OTT apps. Therefore, the standby mode of the device will consume more power until it is restarted.

Perhaps Samsung's future firmware update will solve this problem as this is not a hardware problem. Currently if not affected by the above error, the standby status of both device versions gives the same battery life and both are better than the predecessor Galaxy S9 +.

To sum up, the Galaxy S10+ with a Snapdragon 855 SoC should be better than the Exynos model when it comes to overall performance. However, the Exynos model offers better battery life when you use the phone for less CPU-intensive apps.