Samsung isn’t known for pulling punches. The Korean electronics company has previously released commercials taking shots at Apple for the iPhone X’s notched display. Now, Samsung is back at it again with yet another anti-iPhone advertisement, this time dragging the competition’s download speeds.
The ad, dubbed “Ingenious: Speed,” parodies a Genius Bar employee refusing to concede to the Samsung Galaxy S9 has superior downloading capabilities. This seems to be touting the numbers released by Ookla’s Speedtest Intelligence Data earlier this year, which compared the weighted average download speeds of major LTE carriers. As you could imagine given the aggressive tone of the ad, Samsung came out on top.
This commercial also comes weeks away from the expected unveiling of the Galaxy Note 9 — Samsung’s next-generation smartphone-tablet hybrid. The company sent out invitations to an event that will be hosted in Brooklyn, New York on August 9. This ad could have been a way to build hype ahead of what could be a big product announcement.
A performance test that found iPhone chips outperform the Samsung Galaxy S9's hardware.
We’re all for brands competing to get us the best possible tech at the lowest possible price, but what Samsung’s video fails to mention is that while the Galaxy S9 won the download speed battle in one case, the iPhone X handily triumphed in prior performance tests.
When electronics magazine AnandTech pitted the Galaxy S9, iPhone X, and iPhone 7 against each other, they found that the Samsung handset had trouble competing with even the iPhone 7. The S9 makes use of two Qualcomm chips — the Exynos 9810 and Snapdragon 845 — while the iPhone X and 7 have the Apple’s A11 Bionic and A10 chips respectively.
In a GeekBench 4 Single Core test — which times how long it takes the processor to complete a series of calculations — both Apple chips outperformed the S9’s hardware. In a subsequent WebXPRT 2015 benchmark — which evaluates how well a device can carry out Web-based tasks — the A11 took the W once again.
So while tech company drama might be entertaining to keep up with, don’t always believe the numbers they throw at you in ads. There will more than likely be data that states the contrary.
