With the Spring Festival holiday approaching, the release of the first flagship models in 2022 has basically come to an end.
Compared with previous years, this year's first flagship models have obviously become richer in product form and positioning. In addition to the conventional curved screen large-size models, such as small-screen flagships, straight-panel flagships, and even folding-screen flagship models, all ushered in a round of concentrated outbreaks at the beginning of this year.
The reason behind this phenomenon is, on the one hand, of course, the needs of consumers. But on the other hand, from the actual measurement of a number of new flagships by our Sanyi Life, the new generation of Snapdragon 8 mobile platform (hereinafter referred to as the new Snapdragon 8) has significantly improved the heating and power consumption performance compared with the previous generation, which has also contributed to a large extent to the launch of flagship products with smaller size, thinner and lighter fuselage and more diversified shapes.
Of course, for the performance, temperature control and power consumption performance of the new Snapdragon 8 this time, we have conducted detailed tests and analysis in many previous reviews of Sanyi Life. However, we recently noticed that in addition to the performance and power consumption of this new platform, some friends also have a lot of concerns about the network connection capabilities and signal stability performance of the new flagship.
That being the case, we're going to test how the WiFi and 5G network connectivity experience of the new Snapdragon 8 platform performs in the current home environment.
A brief analysis of the new Snapdragon 8 technology and the reasons why we chose the test machine
First of all, on the evaluation device, we chose the Real Me GT2 Pro just released by Realme not long ago. The reason for choosing this model is mainly due to three considerations.
First of all, according to the relevant information previously released by Qualcomm at the Snapdragon Technology Summit, the wireless-related function module of the new Snapdragon 8 can basically be regarded as composed of three parts.
The first part is the snapdragon X65 baseband integrated by the new Snapdragon 8. It is also the only solution that fully complies with the 3GPP Rel-16 specification and supports almost all 5G bands around the world ( including the FR1 band of 450MHz-6GHz and the FR2 band of 24.25GHz-52.6GHz ) at the same time. And the Snapdragon X65 can support up to 10Gbps 5G network bandwidth, which makes it undoubtedly the latest, most comprehensive, and fastest 5G baseband of the current technology.
At the same time, inside the new Snapdragon 8, an AI engine with 4 times the performance of the previous generation is also integrated. Today, it can not only be used for photography, AI image and audio optimization during gameplay, but also pioneered the industry's first antenna tuning technology based on AI engine-driven. According to the information released by Qualcomm, this technology can make the mobile phone more intelligently judge the occlusion caused by the user's grip on the antenna, thereby improving the accuracy of the automatic switching of the mobile phone antenna by up to 30%.
In terms of WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, the new Snapdragon 8 also has the FastConnect 6900, which is the "official" wireless module, and it enables the new Snapdragon 8 to support the latest Bluetooth 5.2 and WiFi6 enhanced connectivity capabilities. Compared with the earlier WiFi6 or "WiFi6+", The WiFi6 Enhanced Edition can theoretically achieve a 2-3 times handshake bandwidth increase, coupled with the FastConnect 6900 has dual WiFi connection acceleration capabilities, which allows it to connect two WiFi sources at the same time to achieve network acceleration during daily downloads and games.
However, because of this, in order to "completely test" the full connectivity of the new Snapdragon 8 platform, it is necessary to choose a flagship model equipped with AI tuning technology and using the FastConnect 6900 instead of other wireless modules. In the new Snapdragon 8 models that have been released so far, the True Self GT Pro2 just happens to have all the new wireless technology features of this platform at the same time.
In addition, from the perspective of product form and audience, as a flagship model with 2K 120Hz high-quality direct screen, many "potential users" of The True Self GT Pro2 may be players who attach importance to video and game experience. For this part of the consumer, the impact of network performance on daily use will be relatively greater. And this is also an important reason why we chose it as a test platform.
WiFi connectivity test: Noisy environments can also have high bandwidth and low latency
After talking about the theoretical technical specifications and product characteristics, let's enter the actual testing link.
In order to make the test results closer to the situation in everyone's home, we use a router based on Qualcomm IPQ8071A platform, which supports WiFi6 and 160MHz high frequency bandwidth technology, but does not support 4K QAM. In other words, this is a mid-to-high-end router product between the basic "WiFi6" and the latest "WiFi6 Enhanced Edition".
It is worth mentioning that we did not deliberately let the router connect only to the real GT2 Pro device in order to make the test results look better. In fact, the 2400Mbps handshake speed that we see now is actually the result we measured on the phone under the premise that the router has more than 30 IoT devices mounted.
So, at this time, how much transmission bandwidth can we actually "divide" the gt2 Pro we have at hand? Let's test it first with the simplest method, which is the APP download. It was measured that when it continuously updated 18 app models with a total of about 900MB, it took only 1 minute to complete the download and installation. And "Peace Elite", which has a package size of about 1.9GB, took only 2 minutes to download.
With the help of the test software launched by the Institute of Information and Communications Technology, we can see that the wireless environment around the GT2 Pro is actually quite noisy at this time. However, it still ran a measured bandwidth of close to 650Mbps on our test router across a wall.
What is this concept? You know, in fact, whether you download games on your mobile phone, install applications, or watch online videos every day, the bandwidth that the server can really give to a single user is often only about 200Mbps. That is to say, even if it is not equipped with a top router, the real self GT2 Pro WiFi throughput performance of the new Snapdragon 8 at hand has actually exceeded the maximum download bandwidth that games and video providers can give.
So, is this a "waste"? Apparently not. On the one hand, with the increasing advancement of today's home broadband "speed up and fee reduction", it is only a matter of time before major network platforms can provide higher quality video and higher quality games, and open up larger servers to download bandwidth to terminal devices.
On the other hand, the ability to connect to high quality WiFi means not only "large bandwidth," but also "low latency." In fact, judging from the network latency test results of the test software, the GT2 Pro we have at hand can achieve ultra-low latency performance of 30ms or even less than 20ms in almost all commonly used software. Note that this is also done when the router load is not low and the surrounding network is noisy, so the WiFi performance of the new Snapdragon 8 is also evident.
5G Network Speed Measurement: Gigabit Wireless Experience Anytime, Anywhere
After testing the WiFi, let's talk about the 5G network experience brought by the new Snapdragon 8 for the real GT2 Pro.
In order to more fully test the mobile network performance of the new Snapdragon 8, we inserted 5G SIM cards from two different operators (China Telecom/China Unicom) for the True Self GT2 Pro. And both cards have opened 5G packages and ensure that the phone bill is sufficient.
Judging from the relevant setting options of the True Self GT2 Pro, its current system version can already support dual-CARD VoLTE standby and dual-card intelligent switching networking. But perhaps in order to save power, two cards can not be in 5G mode at the same time in the network, non-priority networking cards will automatically be 4G standby, only to the need for this card networking will automatically switch to 5G mode.
Of course, under the current technical conditions, the significance of "5G dual standby" is indeed not great, because on the one hand, no matter what application can not use the access points of two operators at the same time (even if it is the official speed measurement APP of the Academy of Information and Communications Technology, it can only connect to the speed measurement node of one operator at a time). On the other hand, at present, China's 5G network has not yet opened VoNR high-definition call service, so the daily use of 4G networks can already meet the VoLTE call needs of non-network cards.
Without further ado, we started taking actual speed measurements for 5G networks. First of all, in the indoor environment, the actual network bandwidth measured is 727Mbps. But it should be known that at present, no matter which domestic operator, the maximum theoretical bandwidth of the 5G package is only 1000Mbps. Therefore, being able to achieve more than 70% of the theoretical maximum speed indoors is already a very good, even somewhat "magical" achievement.
However, what is more "magical" is that when we came to the outdoor with the test machine to use the software for road testing, we found that on the one hand, the real self GT2 Pro equipped with the new Snapdragon 8 did not "drop" the signal once during the 10-minute mobile test, maintaining 100% of the 5G residency ratio. On the other hand, it has run more than 940 Mbps of measured 5G bandwidth in the outdoor environment of residential areas, which is very close to the theoretical maximum network speed.
What does this mean? On the one hand, we can say that compared with a year or two ago, the progress of 5G networks in signal coverage and network speed experience is very obvious. On the other hand, considering that we have been holding the mobile phone in our hands for mobile road testing, this also seems to show that the new Snapdragon 8 platform has antenna optimization technology with AI computing power, coupled with the X65 baseband that meets the latest industry standards, and the performance in the current 5G mobile scenario is indeed very reliable.
Finally, we also briefly tested the "elevator network performance" that some friends will be more concerned about and the new Snapdragon 8. It can be seen that inside the elevator, the main card of the True Self GT2 Pro only has a 4G network at this time, but the signal is in good condition and has not been disconnected. Once out of the elevator, the main card was restored to the 5G signal almost instantaneously, even if at this time we actually walked into the stairwell next to it in order to deliberately "increase the difficulty".
Summary: Super signal performance, this is what the "5G flagship" should look like
To be honest, before doing this test, we actually did not have too high expectations for the network signal performance of the new Snapdragon 8. After all, friends who are familiar with our three easy lives know that over the years we have not advocated "5G speed measurement", and one of the big reasons is that in our view, 5G networks are still far from "complete body".
But it has to be said that even under the limited WiFi and 5G network conditions, the new Snapdragon 8 platform and its network strength, network speed and network throughput processing capacity on the real gt2 Pro still bring us great surprises. It not only makes great progress in daily network signal stability and latency performance of actual network applications compared to many flagship models last year, but more importantly, it makes us feel for the first time that the original 5G network has been very fast and stable, far exceeding the bandwidth requirements of almost all networking applications.
This means that to some extent, the 2022 flagship 5G platform represented by the new Snapdragon 8 and their models are fully equipped with the ability to fully utilize the potential of home Gigabit WiFi networks and outdoor Gigabit 5G networks in various situations. In contrast, it is now the networked application itself that has become an obstacle to further improvement of the user experience.
So, when will the super app that can really "eat" the gigabit network speed on the mobile phone side arrive? Let's wait and see.