MobileMonday Global

^{Two-year-old phone still tops the chart} Nokia’s smartphone isn’t getting faster

Nokia’s new Nseries smartphones are not getting faster, they are getting slower. The benchmark tests of Futuremark show that the best performing phone in Nokia line-up is still the N93 that first came to stores in the summer of 2006, over two years ago.

Nokia’s great success, the N95 multimedia computer, compares well with N93, especially after its firmware updating.

But the test scores of the brand new N96 fall far behind the N93 and N95. It is especially sluggish in the 3G graphics performance with scores reaching only one tenth of the top-level performers.

Even in the system tests N96 scores are somewhat lower than the old N93. Overall, the systems test results for all three Nokia phones are in the same ballpark. The same holds true with new Samsung SGH-L870. Unfortunately, Samsung’s Symbian phone would not run all the 3D-tests.

The technical explanation behind the lack of progress is the new platform. In the new phones Nokia is using a hardware platform from ST Microelectronics. The best performers have been built on Texas Instruments’ OMAP 2 platform. Presumably we will see several ST Micro-based smartphones in the near future. Judging from the performance, the decision to switch the platforms must have been made for financial reasons.

Nokia N96 is much slower than 2 year old N93 Bigger is better
Phone model	N93	N95 (FW 11.0.026)	N96	Samsung SGH-L870
SPMark Score, 1)	5362	6381	2253	N/A
3D Score, 2)	9061	6878	898	N/A
System Score, 3)	2205	1635	1895	1950
Details: 3D Performance
3D Game	84.6	71.5	12.7	N/A
3D FillRate	40.8	27.4	2.8	2.3
3D PolyCount	695.6	552.6	69.0	N/A
System Tests
2D Image, 4)	64.2	64.2	64.2	64.2
Image Scaling, 5)	6.1	7.4	5.7	5.5
JPEG Encoding, 6)	1221	1175	1073	740
Contacts, 7)	11.8	10.3	8.7	12.1
Calendar, 8)	7.7	7.7	5.1	5.2
Disk Access, 9)	34.9	5.7	35.3	44.5

Source: Futuremark
1) Overall Score of Performance, 2) Overall 3D Performance Score,
3) Overall System level Performance Score (basic usefulness score), 4) Performance of 2D Image
Drawing Operations, 5) Performance of Image Scaling Operations, 6) Performance of
Image Covertion/Encoding Operations, 7) Basic Contacts Application Test from
Performance/Usefullness point of view, 8) Basic Calender Application Test from Performance,
9) Performance of memory (file open/save/delete) operations

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