Smartphone speed shootout – R449 Mobicel Astro vs R19,999 Samsung Galaxy S10+
New data from Counterpoint Research, MTN, and Vodacom has revealed that the two most popular smartphones in South Africa are the Mobicel Astro and Hisense U962.
There is a good reason for their popularity: the Mobicel Astro costs only R449 while the Hisense U962 gives a fairly good user experience for its R899 price tag.
MyBroadband decided to buy these two popular smartphones and see how they perform against the top-of-the-range Samsung Galaxy S10+, which costs around R20,000.
We only looked at one component, however – the connectivity speeds of the phones as measured by download speed, upload speed, and latency.
Unfair comparison
Before you start typing a comment in a fit of rage to highlight that this is not a fair fight, of course it is not.
The Samsung Galaxy S10+ is one of the most advanced smartphones in the world and it costs 45-times more than the Mobicel Astro.
The focus of the Mobicel Astro and the Hisense U962 is also not performance, it is affordability.
In fact, to cut costs both the Mobicel Astro and the Hisense U962 only offer 3G connectivity instead of LTE.
Samsung, on the other hand, spared no expense to produce the best smartphone in the world.
This includes the latest connectivity technology like LTE Cat.20, enhanced 4X4 MIMO, 7CA, and LAA with up to 2Gbps download speeds and 150Mbps upload speeds.
So, it is definitely not a fair comparison – but we tested them nonetheless to see what the performance difference was.
The results
For the test, MyBroadband put an MTN SIM in each of the phones and installed a custom version of the MyBroadband Speed Test App on them.
We then took these three phones for a spin around Gauteng with the software conducting regular download, upload, and latency tests.
The graphic below shows the performance of the three phones.
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