When samsung told the public that they decided to change the processor in their latest flagship from snapdragon 810 to an exynos chip due to overheating issues most people thought that samsung was just finding a reason to use their own chip in their flagship devices because it gives them more profit. And then I think executives from LG publicly reported that the chip performance is satisfactory and that there isn’t any overheating issue with the snapdragon. and this strengthened the argument against samsung.
But all that time I was thinking whether samsung would really do that. I mean samsung is in a really desperate situation now, their sales has been going down and the profits have come down by almost 60% in 1 year. Samsung was so desperate that they were ready to give up the removable battery and micro sd card features in their latest device to release a device with a better design. Something which many people considered as an awesome feature in the galaxy series phones. Also Qualcomm’s previous snapdragon SoCs were really good that the consumers expected every flagship to come out with a snapdragon chip. So I don’t think samsung was in a position to drop the snapdragon chip just to use their own chip in their flagship device.
The issues of the 810 became very clear when the LG G Flex 2 was released. Most people who reviewed the device said it was a really slow device. Pocketnow even said the system was really slow because when ever it did something the thermal kicked in and brought the performance down. Also recent reports shows that the new htc flagship, the htc one m9 heats up to 55 degree Celsius when it runs GFXBench. That’s really crazy. We wont be able to hold the phone comfortably at that temperature.
This is a really big problem because if the overheating is due to some hardware issues rather than software then I don’t think there is anything that can be done. Because all they can do now is release a new revision of chip which doesn’t have these issues. But I am not sure wether Qualcomm will be able to come out with a new version in such a short period of time. Also I really don’t think it’s a software issue because android lollipop has been out for more than half a year now and companies like samsung, htc, LG and even google had more than enough time to correct the issues if it was related to the software. So I strongly believe that this is a hardware issue which all these companies tried to control but they all failed.
So to conclude all the devices which use this snapdragon chip will have the overheating issue which means that they are all going to perform poorly because of the thermal kicking in. Also now its not possible for companies like htc and LG to drop the 810 chip and switch to a different one. So now it feels that for the first time we are going to have a number of flagships devices with poor performance and this will hurt the sales of these devices. And I think Samsung kind of avoided such a really bad situation by making a really bold decision which many people didn’t like. I really feel that a company like Qualcomm should have been more responsible and careful while designing such a chip or they should have at-least made sure that the final version of the chip was released only after all these issues were solved.
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