PERFORMANCE
Do our flighty flagships have the stamina of true thoroughbreds?
You’ll comfortably get a day’s use from a single charge of the battery
Dashing looks and a stellar camera don’t make a fully fledged flagship - the best smartphones around also need to have enough raw, unfettered grunt under the hood to strike fear into the engines of a F1 car, and a battery that can keep going lap after lap.
The LG G6 comes equipped with a quadcore Snapdragon 821 chipset and 4GB of RAM, which is a decent slug of power - but the chip is not the latest version. The newest Snapdragon is the 835, which can be found in the likes of the Sony Xperia XZ Premium, and thus the G6 is immediately at a muscle disadvantage. It has the weakest pure performance of the three, as shown by our benchmarking tests. It does claw back some self respect by boasting the largest battery of the trio, at 3,300mAh, comfortably giving you a day of usage from a single charge.
Meanwhile the Huawei P10 fares better in the power department, with the firm’s in-house developed octa-core Kirin 960 chipset paired with 4GB of RAM - giving you more than enough power for anything you’d want to do on your smartphone. With a smaller screen than the G6 and a bigger battery than the S8, the P10 should theoretically perform nicely (or slowly, should we say) when it comes to battery expenditure. Sadly though, it doesn’t excel and ends up on par with the others with a day’s use from a single charge.
The power king, however, is the Galaxy S8, with Samsung’s own octa-core Exynos 8895 chipset backed up with 4GB of RAM that keeps everything ticking over nicely. Running the S8 through our benchmark tests, it didn’t just beat the two other phones, it racked up a score higher than any phone we’ve laid our hands on… ever. All that power, coupled with the huge display, also makes the S8 an excellent VR machine. We didn’t expect it to last long – with the smallest power pack and the biggest screen we feared somewhat for the battery life, but again it’ll last you a day on a single charge.