The competition for the best-performing smartphone is fierce and we may have a new champ soon – the ZTE Axon 10 Pro 5G – which topped the charts at AnTuTu. The Axon counts itself among the many Snapdragon 855-powered phones, but interestingly enough it’s not the chipset that secured its win, it’s the storage.



AnTuTu score breakdown for the ZTE Axon 10 Pro 5G

AnTuTu reports that the Axon 10 Pro 5G is the first phone to combine the S855 chipset with the F2FS file system. It was developed by Samsung specifically for use with flash storage, which makes it much faster than the ext4 used by most Androids (which was designed for HDDs).

For some reason Samsung stuck with ext4 for the Galaxy S10. The Pixel 3 uses F2FS, but that’s a Snapdragon 845-based phone.

AnTuTu 7

Higher is better

ZTE Axon 10 Pro 5G

381136

Meizu 16s

374190

Xiaomi Mi 9

372006

Oppo Reno 10x zoom

369254

Asus Zenfone 6

363172

Apple iPhone XS Max

353210

Samsung Galaxy S10+

333736

LG G8 ThinQ

331537

Huawei P30 Pro (perf. mode)

316156

Anyway, the ZTE flagship performed 50% better in the storage part of the benchmark than other 855-powered phone. It wasn’t just the file system, though.

The phone uses Sandisk iNAND 8521 chips with 64-layer 3D NAND tech, which features improved sequential and random write performance. They can reach 500MB/s during sequential writes while the average speeds measured by AnTuTu for this class of phone is 200-250MB/s.

The Axon 10 Pro 5G comes pretty close to maxing out the chips, reaching 792MB/s and 486MB/s in sequential reads and writes, respectively, as well as 5,314 IOPS and 2,527 IOS in random reads and writes.



Axon 10 Pro 5G vs. average S855 phone: Sequential read/write • Random read/write

Check out the charts above – the new chips and the more suitable file system result in much better write speeds and random performance.

Besides the superior storage and 5G connectivity, this Axon also promises an innovative 6.47” OLED display with a metal mesh that shaves 30% off the thickness of the panel. The lower bezel (the chin) also promises to be the smallest yet at just 1.8mm.

The Axon 10 Pro 5G will launch in China on May 6.

Source 1 (in Chinese) | Via 1 | Source 2