Only yesterday, Samsung announced its latest range of flagship smartphones at its Galaxy UNPACKED event in San Francisco. The Korean electronics manufacturer announced a total of four new devices with one being the long-expected foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Fold. The other three belong to the Galaxy S10 range: the S10, S10+, and S10e. Today though, let’s compare the specs of the Galaxy S10+ with those of its biggest competitor, the Apple iPhone XS Max. Do note that this comparison is made solely based on the specs of the two models and that only a definite review of the Galaxy S10+ will let us carry out a full-blown comparo.
The Galaxy S10+ and the iPhone XS Max are evidently large-screen counterparts of the Galaxy S10 and the iPhone XS respectively but it seems not by too much, at least with the Samsung flagship. The Galaxy S10+’s display is only 0.3 inches larger than that of the Galaxy S10. The real difference lies in the camera and memory departments. The iPhone XS Max, on the other hand, has a bigger display still, even if it’s only by a tiny-0.1 inch margin.
The display on the Galaxy S10+ is a 6.4-inch Dynamic AMOLED unit with an aspect ratio of 19:9 and a max resolution of 1440 x 3040 pixels. In comparison, the iPhone XS Max has a slightly larger 6.5-inch Super AMOLED display with an even taller aspect ratio of 19.5:9 and a max resolution of 1242 x 2688 pixels. The iPhone’s display has a wide notch on the top while the Galaxy S10+’s display has Samsung’s Infinity-O design, which means there’s a cutout for the two selfie cameras on the upper right corner of the display.
What underpins the Samsung Galaxy S10+ depends on the region in which it’s being sold. However, the spec sheet shared at the time of the launch of the device states that the Galaxy S10+ comes with a 7-nanometre 64-bit Exynos 9820 chipset. The chipset on the Galaxy S10+ is the same as the one on the Galaxy S10. The fastest core on the Exynos clocks in at 2.8GHz. The iPhone XS Max, on the other hand, comes with Apple’s proprietary A12 Bionic chip.
In our review, the iPhone XS Max scored scored 4692 and 10997 in Geekbench 4’s Single and Multi-Core benchmarks respectively. Though we have no first-hand figures of the Galaxy S10+’s performance, we’re confident it’ll score upwards of 10,000 in the same Geekbench 4 Multi-Core test. Still, we can confirm such figures only when we get our hands on the new Samsung flagship.
The camera setup on the Galaxy S10+ is similar to that of the smaller Galaxy S10. On the back the Galaxy S10+ has a 12-megapixel telephoto camera with phase-detection autofocus and an aperture of f/2.4, a 12-megapixel wide-angle camera with a 77-degree field of view and an aperture of f/1.5, and finally, a 16-megapixel ultra-wide unit with a 123-degree field of view and an aperture of f/2.2. There are two selfie cameras in the front: a 10-megapixel camera with an aperture of f/1.9 and an 8-megapixel camera with an aperture of f/2.2 and depth sensor.
In comparison, the iPhone XS Max has two 12-megapixel cameras on the back. One is a wide-angle camera with an aperture of f/1.8 and the other is a telephoto camera with an aperture of f/2.4. The iPhone XS’ display notch houses a single 7-megapixel TrueDepth selfie camera with an aperture of f/2.2. It’s clear then, that the difference between the iPhone XS and the iPhone XS Max is in the display size and not in other departments like optics.
The Samsung Galaxy S10+ comes with massive LPDDR4X RAM options: 8GB and 12GB. Storage onboard goes all the way up to 1TB, while expanded storage using a microSD card goes up to 512GB, giving the user a total of 1.5TB of storage for their media. Though Apple doesn’t publish how much RAM their iPhones come with, we believe the iPhone XS Max has 4GB of RAM. Storage onboard is limited to 512GB internally and there’s no option to expand it.
The Samsung Galaxy S10+ comes with a considerably large 4,100mAh battery, while the Apple iPhone XS Max comes with a relatively smaller 3,174mAh battery. It’s hard to say whether the Galaxy S10+ will outlast the Apple iPhone XS Max in terms of battery life but we’ll get a better idea once we have the device in our hands. On the bright side, both phones have Qi-certified wireless charging. That said, the Galaxy S10+ can charge another device wirelessly while it’s being charged using cable using its PowerShare technology.
The Samsung Galaxy S10+ comes in 1TB, 512GB and 128GB storage variants in India and is priced at Rs 1,17,900, Rs 91,900 and Rs 73,900 respectively. The 1TB and 512GB versions of the phone is also available in ceramic white and ceramic black colour special edition. Coming to the iPhone XS Max, the 64GB variant of the handset is priced at Rs 1,09,900, while its 256GB and 512GB variants costs Rs 1,24,900 and Rs 1,44,900 respectively. Prebookings of the Galaxy S10+ are now underway in India and you can learn more about the offers and how to pre-book the phone here.