Global Top 10 Best Performing Android Phones, September 2020

In October 2020, the second half of Android phone configuration competition has officially started. This month Apple has officially launched its first 5G phones with a more powerful A14 chip. More interestingly, Qualcomm officially announced this week that it would hold the annual technical summit in December and launch the new-generation flagship SoC Snapdragon 875 thereon. The phone performance competition seems not to end forever.

Let's see what changes happened to the Android phone performance ranking list in September.

This time, the data was collected for a period from September 1, 2020 to September 30, 2020; the results in the ranking list are average scores instead of the highest scores; and there are more than 1,000 pieces of information on single phone model. The data was calculated based on Antutu V8. If any single phone model has several memory capacity versions, then its version of the highest memory capacity shall prevail.

1. Flagship Phones

In this performance ranking list, Asus' ROG Phone 3 still stands at the first place with an average score of 642,671 in September. As usual, it is the first phone model to ship with flagship Snapdragon SoC "+" this year. Historically, Asus gaming phones have always stood at the first place in the performance ranking for consecutive months since their respective launch.

This Asus ROG Phone 3 is equipped with a 6.59-inch AMOLED display screen which supports the 144Hz refresh rate, the 275Hz touch response, and HDR 10+ and achieves a response time of 1ms and a resolution ratio of 2340×1080. There is a transparent area on the back of this phone, so we can see its internal cooling fin. The cooling fin of ROG Phone 3 is 7 times bigger than that of the last generation and covers the main cooling parts, achieving a more efficient cooling capacity.

Most interestingly, this phone is also equipped with one 6,000mAh battery and two Type-C interfaces. You can hold this phone in whatever direction and use it while charging it, which is a unique highlight of the gaming phone.

The product ranking second is Mi 10 Ultra, the latest flagship phone of Xiaomi with a Snapdragon 865 processor. Its comprehensive score is 640,296, just more than 2,000 points lower the Asus ROG Phone 3 which ranks No. 1. Obviously, what is the most crucial is not the processor performance, but the degree of optimization by the manufacturer.

This phone performs very well with many new technologies exclusively developed by Xiaomi (e.g.: Write Turb and HDB software supports), so such a result is not surprising.

Besides, it should be noted that MIUI 12 embedded in Mi 10 Extreme Commemorative Edition has a function named GameTurbo 4.0, by which users can control the GPU frequency of a single game and choose the degree of SoC performance for this game manually. For users who like playing games and pursue high performance, such a function is the icing on the cake. We hope that more mobile phones will have similar functions in the future.

The popular OPPO Find X2 Pro stands at the third place with an average score of 610,961 in September, much lower than those of the products ranking first and second. It is also the last phone with a score of over 600,000 in the ranking list. Since its launch in this March, it has been completely ranking at the top in terms of configuration and performance, with an up-to-date advanced screen. It can be seen that OPPO Find X2 Pro is very powerful.

Following them, the seven phone models are respectively OnePlus 8 Pro (average score: 598,891), iQOO Neo3 (average score: 595,329), Galaxy Note20 Ultra 5G (average score: 594,890), Galaxy Z Fold2 5G (average score: 593,546), Redmi K30 Pro (average score: 591,941), Mi 10 Pro (average score: 582,055), and OnePlus 8 (average score: 576,562).

 It can be seen that Samsung Note20 Ultra 5G and Galaxy Z Fold2 5G are also powered by the Snapdragon 865+ processor like the product ranking first, but their scores are around 50,000 lower than that of the product ranking first. Therefore, it should be noted again that the processor performance is just one of factors influencing the score, the comprehensive score is determined by the manufacturer's overall optimization and processing solution, and the mobile phone performance cannot be judged only in light of its processor.

2. Mid-range Phones

Compared with the only processor - Snapdragon 865 Series in the flagship phone ranking, there are various processors in the mid-range phone ranking, including phone models of Qualcomm as well as MediaTek and Hisilicon Kirin.

In the mid-range phone ranking, iQOO Z1 ranks No. 1 with an average score of 514,902. It is the first phone to ship with MediaTek Tianji 1000+ processor. The phone model ranking second is Redmi K30 Ultra with the same processor, and its average score is 481,003.

What's very interesting is that MediaTek Dimensity 1000+ is positioned as a flagship 5G SoC of MediaTek but used in mid-range phones by terminal manufacturers due to some long-term problems concerning brand and manufacturer. Therefore, this phone has just been included in the mid-range phone ranking list, despite its flagship SoC. The score of iQOO Z1 that ranks No. 1 in this list is also much lower than the lowest score among those of phones with Snapdragon 865. Therefore, MediaTek needs to make more efforts to develop the flagship SoC.

Honour 30 stands at the third place in this ranking. Its Kirin 985 SoC, a processor independently developed by Huawei, is second only to Kirin 990 5G presently, but its performance has been further improved when compared with the performance of Kirin 820.

And it's said that Kirin 985 and Kirin 820 are the same chip in nature, but the latter has two GPU cores shielded and Kirin 985 is completely open. That's exactly toothpaste squeezing.

Following them, the seven phone models are respectively Huawei nova 7 (average score: 398,328), Mi 10 Lite 5G (average score: 322,997), Redmi K30 5G (average score: 316,343), HUAWEI nova 7i (average score: 310,976), realme 7 (average score: 298,717), Redmi Note 8 Pro (average score: 292,126), and realme 6 (average score: 290,687).

October is the second half of the launch season for Android phones every year. Huawei Mate40 and OnePlus 8T both will be launched in this month, after which this ranking list will change again. The most striking is certainly what result will Huawei Kirin 9000 processor achieve. It is of great significance as the last-generation self-developed processor of Huawei.

5nm will be a keyword for the next generation of processors which will achieve further better performance and lower power consumption. The foreseeable and more powerful terminal devices are drawing near.