Samsung's New S10 Plus Smartphone May Not Keep Pace With the iPhone XS

There’s a ton of hype surrounding Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S10 smartphone series that will debut in San Francisco and London February 20. Samsung will most likely reinvent the notch and introduce a behind-the-screen fingerprint scanner — and there could even be 5G model in the midst. But the flashy new phone might struggle to keep up with phones from 2018 under the hood.

One of the larger models that Samsung will likely unveil, the 6.4-inch S10 Plus, hasn’t been officially confirmed, but it already has bad online cred. A screenshot, published Thursday by leak aggregation site SlashLeaks, allegedly revealed that the phablet’s processing power doesn’t come close to Apple’s 2018 iPhone XS.

The image shows that the S10 Plus scored more than 1,000 points lower than the XS in the Geekbench 4 overall performance test, which evaluates how devices’ CPUs handle different workloads. If these scores are accurate, and barring any changes Samsung might make to the phone before launch, the S10 Plus could be 1.5 times slower than the XS.

Samsung’s S10 Plus is expected to be powered by Qualcomm’s next-generation Snapdragon 855 processor, while Apple used its proprietary A12 Bionic chip for its most recent smartphone releases. The iPhone maker wasn’t shy about flexing that its 7-nanometer CPU was capable of carrying out 5 trillion operations per second when it was launched, and the move seems to have paid off.

These early results are encouraging news for Apple, which had a less-than-pristine start to 2019. The company kicked off the year with foreboding revenue news, due in large part to a slowdown in phone sales. This could position the iPhone XS as a slightly older but more computationally powerful alternative to the S10 Plus for United States users. However, Apple’s handset will likely still be the more expensive option.

In December, a report by Gizmodo UK states

A December report said that the S10 Plus could start at £899 (about $1,158), compared to the iPhone XS’s $999 US starting price and £999 UK price (about $1,291). So a 2018 smartphone might be more expensive than one from this year, but at least it’ll be blazing fast.