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Sony Xperia Z3 Outperforms Snapdragon 810 in Z4

When Sony launched the Z4 in April 2015, a lot of people were curious about Sony’s choice of going with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 for their flagship. This curiosity was based on the then doubts about the heating issues of the processor, as well as rumors of LG’s decision to drop the Snapdragon 810 in favor of the Snapdragon 808 for its flagship.

Sony is pretty adamant in going along with the sinking ship of the Snapdragon 810 and its issues of excessive heat and resultant throttling, as its latest release on American soil, the Verizon Wireless Exclusive Sony Xperia Z4v, stands testimony. The phone features the same Snapdragon 810, but with a bumped up QHD display from the Z4/Z3+. But how bad is the chip really?

Vietnamese Tech Reviewer Vật Vờ took it upon himself to see how much of an improvement the Xperia Z4 brings over the Xperia Z3. For all practical reasons, it’s the Snapdragon 810 vs the Snapdragon 801. The results were presented in an easy to understand video format (with audio in Vietnamese), so have a look.

The Xperia Z3 is on the left in White with the Xperia Z4/z3+ is on the right in Black. Both the phones were made to go through similar multitasking operations of gaming and camera. In the beginning, both the phones performed neck to neck, with only split second delays which would not affect practical users. However, as the running apps started piling and the processor started getting pushed harder and for longer durations (point where thermal throttling starts getting more aggressive as heat rises), the Xperia Z3 actually started outperforming the Xperia Z4, ending the task queued up 7 seconds earlier than the Z4.

While this was not one of the most scientific tests done, it does beat upon the dead horse that the Snapdragon 810 is a flawed product. Point to note is that the Snapdragon 810 is still a decent performer for all average use cases, even with all its heating issues and aggressive thermal throttling. However, if you as a customer are paying top dollar for the top of the line performance and the latest and greatest in consumer ready technology, the Snapdragon 810 is not the premier and undisputed choice in its current form.

What are your thoughts on the Z3 performing better than the Z4? Let us know in the comments below!

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Samsung Game Recorder+

Game Recorder+ is a new app from Samsung, compatible with recent devices from their S/Note-range. Whilst capturing game footage, you can record commentary through the front facing camera, ‘optimize’ (clear) RAM, and edit videos before uploading.

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Best of XDA: MX Player

There are many video players for Android out there, but there are few that have proven themselves to be mighty in the way MX Player has. It is not only one of the longest-standing popular video players out there, but it’s also stayed high and above in the game with sensible features, amazing performance (not as easy back in those days!) and an amazing user experience. What makes MX Player amazing, and why is it worthy of your media?

First of all, MX Player supports a myriad of formats and codecs off the bat. It doesn’t matter where you got the movie from, chances are it will play. You can also stream media through a network stream by providing a valid URL. Audio should also not be a problem, and MX Player can recognize every popular subtitle format and render them with their appropriate colors and characteristics. These are also easy to configure with subtitle gestures, being able to move text up and down or zoom in and out to change the text size. As far as the core support goes, you can easily fire and forget as you are not likely to find any compatibility issues.

When it comes to the user experience, MX Player is mostly minimal yet feature-packed. The interface is one of the most unobtrusive ones you will find, with pleasant navigation that’s intuitive and fast. It’s clean all around, and common features are easy to spot. You can lock rotation to avoid any annoyances without having to go to a panel toggle or setting. You can also lock the screen to prevent input, so that accidental touches don’t ruin your movie’s climax. Finally, gestures for brightness, sound, zooming and seeking are easy to use and make it easy for you to find just the right settings you want for the appropriate context. You can also customize the seek speed, auto-hide timer, and which gestures are enabled.

Apart from being able to set the audio and subtitle tracks in a pinch, you can set your preferred languages as well. If you want to use the player for music or to simply listen to a movie, you can set it to play audio in the background even after the screen is closed. As for the playback UI, you can have it clean or set various overlays that are not too distracting and can help you keep track of elapsed and remaining time as well as current time and battery left.

Finally, while many people rather use the player as-is for typical media consumption, you have hardware acceleration as well as the solid software decoding. The former makes use of multimedia chipsets that assist specifically in the video decoding process, and it can make playback faster and smoother. While it is not as flexible as software decoding, it can optimize the experience by making better use of your system. As technology moves on, this feature can admittedly be overlooked – you certainly won’t need it to play your average 1080p film on a recent flagship, but it remains a great option to have regardless. HW+ builds on top of that, though, by using MX Player’s own media framework which allows the mode to play more videos. You can find the option in the decoder settings if your device supports it.

There are many other things that make MX Player great, but ultimately it is its flexibility that allowed it to stand the test of time. You can grab this swiss knife of video consumption and make it your own, be it through theming the interface’s colors to your liking, adjusting parts of the UI, arranging your folders, or modifying your gestures, subtitles, or whatever you want. There are many little things to love as well, such as the fact that the player reminds you of recent files you haven’t yet seen, or the Kids Lock plugin. The fact that all features are included in the free version is the cherry on top, and the Pro version is a small price to pay to make the experience perfect while supporting a huge community app. So what are you waiting for? If you don’t have it, give it a try!

You can get MX Player in the Play Store, and be sure to visit its Community App subforum for everything you need including custom codecs, guides, and more!

Do you love MX Player as much as we do?

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Samsung GPUs Delayed by up to 5 Years

Samsung has been making its own processing packages for years under the Exynos moniker, however the Mali graphics chips they use are actually made by ARM. It’s been known for a while that Samsung have been designing their own in-house GPU but new reports suggest that their release has been pushed back by up to 5 years.

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Motorola UK Summer Sale, Deals on Nexus 6 and Moto X

If you’ve been waiting for the right time to purchase a new smartphone from Motorola UK, this might be your chance. Motorola have just started their Summer Sale, knocking the Nexus 6 down to £399 and their 2nd-gen Moto 2014 down to a thoroughly reasonable £229, until June 30th. Head over to Motorola for more details.

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ARC Welder Updates to Android Lollipop Base

App Runtime and ARC Welder, Chrome’s solution to run Android apps are both receiving an update which brings numerous smaller fixes with one major change – ARC is now based on Android 5.0 Lollipop instead of KitKat. The update is only available for users running Chrome M45 or later on the dev channel.

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Elephone P7000 – Device Review

The Elephone P7000 is a smartphone from a relatively new and unheard of manufacturer. The device is sporting an 64-bit Cortex-A53 1.7GHz Octa-core processor. Is the Elephone P7000 another cheap device from China or is it worth considering? That is only one of the questions XDA TV Producer Jordan answers when he takes the opportunity to review the device. Check out this video to learn what his thoughts are.