Samsung fans give the ultimate insult to the manufacturer's chipsets
A petition has been started on Change.org that asks Samsung to stop selling flagship phones powered by its own Exynos chipsets. Prior to this year, Samsung's flagship phones were powered by its own chipsets everywhere but the U.S. and a couple of other countries. In those locations, the phones had Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon SoC under the hood. But this year, Samsung's flagship phones are powered by the Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform in all markets except in Europe. In the latter continent, the Galaxy S20 line is equipped with the Exynos 990 SoC.
700 more signatures were added in the time it took us to write this article
The petition starts by noting that "Outside of the US, Samsung sells phones that use their own-branded Exynos SoC chips, instead of using Qualcomm's Snapdragon. Samsung also use their own-brand camera sensors, whereas in the US, they use parts from specialists Sony. Based on experience, and studies from numerous sources online, we believe Samsung's parts to be inferior to their US counterparts. Phones with Exynos SoC chips are shown to perform slower, have less battery life, use inferior camera sensors and processing, overheat and throttle faster, amongst other issues."
The petition adds, "At the very least, we would appreciate if Samsung were transparent about their inconsistencies. Alternatively, for Samsung to ensure we weren't paying the exact same price or even higher than our US friends. We have had to accept this over many years over different iterations of the flagship phones. Every year we have hoped for Samsung to either give us the same device or make their own parts perform on par with the competition. They have failed to deliver on these requests over and over again and the performance gap only seems to widen over time. In the age of transparency, it is time for a change and for us consumers to have the right to choose what we spend our hard earned money on.
Samsung, please hear us! We love your devices and want to be treated fairly, so that we can continue to enjoy them."
A petition signed by over 9,000 people demands that Samsung stop selling phones powered by its Exynos chipsets
In the time it took us to write this story and post it, 700 more people signed the petition bringing the number of virtual signatures to 9,706. The petition will need more signatures for Samsung to even think about taking a look at it. The Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform delivers as much as a 20% improvement in performance over the Exynos 990 because the former uses ARM Holdings' Cortex-A77 CPU cores; the latter employs the Cortex-A76 CPU cores. In addition, the Adreno 650 GPU provides a better graphics experience than the ARM Mali G77 GPU that is paired with the Exynos 990 SoC.
Just the other day, kernel source code discovered by XDA revealed that the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 family, the Samsung Galaxy Fold 2, and a mystery device called "the Zodiac project" will all be powered by the Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform. It seems that Samsung's actions indicate that it realizes that Qualcomm's flagship chipset outperforms the Exynos 990 SoC. While both chips support 5G, neither one has an integrated 5G modem. At the same time it introduced the Exynos 990, Sammy unveiled the Exynos 5123 5G modem while the Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform works with the Snapdragon X55 5G modem chip.
Unless you live in Europe, the chances are that any new flagship phone you buy from Samsung this year will feature a Snapdragon chipset. Therefore, the number of Samsung fans who might sign off on this petition is limited compared to the number of those who own a new Galaxy flagship already powered by the Snapdragon 865 SoC. Still, it will be interesting to see how many people are so disappointed in the Exynos 990 that they take time out to sign the petition. We will update the number from time to time, so feel free to check in often.
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