Chips and Salsa XX - When Iconic Meets Anechoic, Part II

Over-the-Air (OTA) MIMO Performance Results of Fifteen Smartphones - from Apple to ZTE

10/29/2015 | 53 pages
Price: $1,595.00

In our 20th Chips and Salsa, we collaborated closely with Spirent Communications, PCTEST, and EMT Labs, to conduct arguably the industry’s most extensive independent OTA MIMO performance testing of leading smartphones – from the Apple iPhone to the ZTE Nubia. All testing took place within an ETS-Lindgren anechoic chamber.  In total, we tested 15 different smartphones (3 bands per phone) that we procured from around the world, including LTE chipsets from 4 different baseband suppliers.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE STUDY INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:

• Two of the top performing smartphones, the Nokia Lumia 930 and the Alcatel OneTouch Idol 3 are “value-priced” smartphones, indicating a disparity between price and performance.

• In general, there was a large variance in the results with the top performing smartphone in a particular band outperforming most of its peers by 50% or more with moderate SNR values.

• Emphasis needs to be placed on validating the RF antenna design – although the selection of the chipset supplier is important, it is only the starting point when it comes to achieving excellent RF performance.

• To varying degrees, all smartphones performed poorly in at least one frequency band – two smartphones performed poorly in all three frequency bands that we tested.