Galaxy S4 way faster than iPhone 5: Which? UK consumer magazine Which? has dropped a benchmark bucket on the iPhone, rating it the slowest of seven smartphones under test. The magazine ran the Geekbench 2 test on seven phones – the iPhone 5, Samsung's Galaxy S4, the HTC One, Sony's Experia Z, Google's Nexus 4, the Samsung Galaxy Note 2, and the BlackBerry Z10. With a …
Microsoft and AMD went through the 'mine is faster than yours' thing a few years ago.
Ok so you might have bragging rights but does it allow you to make quicker calls? Do messages appear quicker?
Does the clock make the minutes pass faster?
It won't be long before consumers wise up to this and buy a phone based on how well it is put together as a package.
A formula one car only lasts one race, I need something to do 100,000 without unnecessary intervention.
Sure it's good enough for most people, but if you just want good enough, why pay for one of the most expensive phones on the market? Samsung have plenty of cheaper offerings if you don't need a full S4. (Also consider future use - older iphones and Android slow down with the latest OS updates or due to more demanding software, don't you want one that will last better?)
It's also a rebuttal to all the years where the media have falsely assumed all along that the iphone was the best phone, including from a pure hardware point of view. It's long been known that it specs like resolution and RAM it's lagged behind, because we can easily compare these - but this shows even on CPU, it's not true either.
I wonder how the ipad mini compares to other Android tablets - again, we see the same thing where much of the media portay it as one of the most advanced tablets, despite poorer resolution and RAM (and at a higher price). Is it at least giving you the fastest CPU for the money?
I'll start with the standard stock warning that past performance is no guarantee of future earnings.
What the higher price from Apple has gotten you in the past is a stable platform. If you wanted to keep your phone for 4 years you could. The cost was a performance hit. As a lot of hardware vendors have been finding out in the PC world, most people just want something that works, not necessarily the fastest latest toy to one up the Joneses. But yes, if you do want to always own one of the fastest toys on the block, buy a new Android at least once every 2 years. No skin off my nose either way. I had an Android HTC that worked well on the rare occasion when I had 4G signal, tolerably when I had 3G, but I was still paying too much so I traded it in for a flip phone that pretty much just makes a rare phone call.
But a phone that's more than fast enough now will have the advantage of lasting longer due to being more future proof. I'm not sure what you mean by stable platform, and people are free to keep their Android phones for 4 years too. It's not clear to me that the iphone platform is better in this regard. If you mean that older iphones can get the latest OS, that's a myth, as they don't get all the functionality.
Android barely existed 4 years ago so it's hard to compare that timescale. But I don't see that a 2 or 3 year old Android phone gives a worse experience than a 2 or 3 year old iphone, if we compare like with like (i.e., comparing two phones that were high end when bought). There are loads of people worldwide still using 4 year old Symbian phones, I'm not sure there are as many people on iphone 3G phones.
Most people want phones that work, and most people do that with Android phones.
"I was still paying too much so I traded it in for a flip phone that pretty much just makes a rare phone call."
Yes, exactly - if one doesn't one high specs, there's no need to spend high prices at all, S4 or iphone or otherwise.
Re the comment about the "myth" of iPhone updates - no, sorry, not a myth. It's true that not every iPhone gets every new feature, but it's also true that many new features do come to older iPhones via updates, along with a continual stream of improvements and security patches etc. Look at ios7 - literally the biggest overhaul to the platform since the first iPhone, with major changes not only to the look and feel of the UI but also the background stuff like multitasking, power management, networking etc - it'll come out on the inevitable iPhone 5S, but not only will it also be downloadable the same day for the iPhone 5, but the 4S from 2011, and even the 4 from 2010. What new OS will be released to the Galaxy S3 this year, let alone the S2 - and how about the Galaxy S, what update is that getting? Jack Schitt, that's what that's getting.
Personally I find it a bit laughable that a supposedly reputable review mag like Which would try and build a review based on some meaningless abstract benchmark that anyone could run - surely there's nothing here that isn't all over the web anyway. To the average Which reader (and in fact the average anybody) the raw CPU performance of these phones, which is all that's being testers here, is utterly meaningless. What happens is how quickly, and how well, the device actually performs its tasks as a smartphone - and a LOT of that has nothing to do with the CPU and everything to do with the software and the rest of the hardware package.
"What new OS will be released to the Galaxy S3 this year, let alone the S2 "
Android 4.2.2 official update is coming to the S3 any time now and probably the S2 (of course there is XDA for those who can't wait). Then Keylime Pie (Android 5.0) should be on the way next. So that's Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean and Keylime Pie major OS updates for the S3 for starters.
I used to have a Iphone 3G running IOS4, IOS4 was released in 2010, 2 years after Android Gingerbread. My Android Gingerbread phone is still going strong.
Now I had to finally abandon my 3G earlier in the year , as the storefront was removed of all IOS4 compatible apps. It is not possible to upgrade the Iphone 3G.
So although android doesnt update as frequently, I can still get apps for it.
The point is that Apple phones have at most a 3 year shelf life, after which you are forced to upgrade as you cannot get any further apps nor can you update your existing apps.
" If you wanted to keep your phone for 4 years you could. "
Eh? Two iPhone 3GS died (well, the batteries died) 53 weeks after purchase. Replaced (at a cost and a shed-load of hassle) by "refurbished phones of similar condition".
No thanks, no fixed battery ever again. Samsung? Plasticy, but do what they say on the tin. Still loving my Galaxy SII. Thinking of Xcover II (or some other water-resistant phone) as a replacement when I lose or break the SII.
"I really can't imagine anyone doing a real world test would conclude the iPhone was a slow-coach."
Once iOS7 appears then we shall see how the current iPhone hardware handles real-world tests once *full* "proper" multi-tasking comes into play like Android has been doing for a very long time. That is when you realise that you suddenly need plenty of RAM, CPU grunt, battery power and good power management (which the S3, S4 and HTC One actually do very well at). It will be interesting to see what iPhone hardware actually gets the iOS7 update with full multitasking.
My phone is fast than my voice and I wish it would slow down the voice of my missus, any apps for that. But seriously my cars is also faster than what I am allowed to drive. So where does this faster actually make any difference. A video moving alone faster than than you can see. What the hell, go for it, we all love "Top Gear" although I cannot stand that guy for even one second any more.
Time to get some of that "innovation" into useability Apple, rather than tinkering with the form factor so much it's now hard to produce. Time to admit you misread the market, and get back to what people want.
Though in their defence - my iphone 5 is hardly slow in my usage model, so one does wonder why we need nearly 2ghz of quad core in a phone?
Years ago people wrote fast code or wrote code then optimised it.
It's a sad day when you need stupid amounts of processing power on a phone. But then it's no wonder we need such power given the latest batch of phones have a display with as many pixels as a full HD TV. They have more pixels than many laptops and desktop machines.
Take a screen shot on your 1080 HD phone and email it to your computer, it's a perfect illustration of how crappy computers are now. You'll have to zoom out the image to see it.
> That's because you bought a top end phone and a low end laptop
Perhaps, but how many laptops on the market have a better screen resolution than a current generation of mobe screen?
Looking at Insight's website (coz you can search on screen res) it shows only 6 and that includes tablets, so
1920x1200 (cica 2003 spec laptop) 1, a Tosh Tough book
2560x1600 a pair of Apples.
2880x1800 oh look another pair of Apples.
(I might hate their business practices but they seems to be the only people trying to make a 21st century laptop at the moment)
Anyone know of any others?
I'm doing loads of work with a major corp at the moment and all the new laptops screen res is too low to show the windows they need to run the SW they've written themselves. Left Hand, meet Right Hand, you know, you guys should talk sometime.
> My 2009 yes thats right 4 years old gateway has a 1920x1200
This is precisely my point. Your 2009 Gateway has a reasonable screen res. Does Gateway make a 2013 laptop with anything other than crap res screens?
My 2003 Dull has a 1920x1200 screen.
My 2009 HP has a 1920x1200 screen, and drives a second external one at the same time.
Last year when I need a replacement is a hurry I couldn't find one and had to go out and buy 2nd hand as being the only way to get the spec I needed.
This new Samsung looks interesting. The pair of HP mobile workstations are damn heavy to lug around when I occasionally need to do so. So thank you for answering my question. I just hope you don't have to suffer W8 on it and it'll run something useful too.
>> It's a sad day when you need stupid amounts of processing power on a phone.
I take it you still use a nokia 3310 and a 286 then?
It sure us a sad day when you need such power as a modern Core processor just to run a desktop OS and an office suite.
Alternatively you could look at it as progress, you know, like we have been doing in tech since the whole thing started. Faster = able to do more.
It sure us a sad day when you need such power as a modern Core processor just to run a desktop OS and an office suite."
True... If I could run a desktop & word processor on an A1200, why does my Windows 7 machine become unresponsive on a 3Ghz CPU with 16GB ram running of an SSD?
And when it does, it is the damned pop up UAC stuff...
it's probably a combination of:-
1. Lower manufacturing costs of faster CPUs, HDDs and RAM chips
2. Marketing teams exploiting the Kano model and providing the cpnsumer with loads of features we don't actually use. How much of all the features of Office 2010 suite do we actually use regularly ? I'd guess at < 50%
3. Programmers exploitting 1 & 2
"I take it you still use a nokia 3310 and a 286 then?"
I have a 6310i. up to 1 month between charges, or several hours on a call and rock solid call quality.
I guess on a phone the most important thing i want is to make and receive calls. Guess I'm out of touch as well.
Faster = able to do more charging
>> I have a 6310i. up to 1 month between charges, or several hours on a call and rock solid call quality.
Good for you. I make about 3 calls a month but have endless uses for a pocket-sized tablet.
>> I guess on a phone the most important thing i want is to make and receive calls. Guess I'm out of touch as well.
Pretty much, yup.
>> Faster = able to do more charging
Or run a variety of foreground and background apps without choking utterly. Either way, The criticism that "OMG how terrible is your phone you need all that power" is nonsense.
It's not a case of "need", it's a case of want, can have and "ooh shiny!".
We don't! But like PC days of old (and Amiga* days before that) it seems as though Android is all about having the biggest numbers and best stats! My phone is faster than yours, ner ner! Candy Crush still plays at exactly the same speed though...
* "Ah but my memory card has a co-processor. I have a 68882 with blah blah blah." Did it actually make a difference to how I used the damn thing? Did it buggery.
*Did it actually make a difference to how I used the damn thing? Did it buggery.*
It will make no difference whatsoever. But maybe it will force marketing drones to think about new ways to justify an overpriced kit? They won't be able to stick to "it's so easy to use" forever...
"Though in their defence - my iphone 5 is hardly slow in my usage model, so one does wonder why we need nearly 2ghz of quad core in a phone?"
Then the new iFolly is released, you rush out to purchase a new status, and suddenly this observation becomes void. Funny That!
The ipHone did not even have the faster core or the most cores when it was released , so what are you wittering on about ?
Personally I think your using your phones specs to make up for a shortage in other departments ;)
Paris becuase she knows what I'm talking about!
Different phones with different operating systems - hardly a realistic benchmark. It would be like putting two cars on a dyno - pulling off their BHP and deducing how well they will drive and how fast they will get around a track. Caring nothing for how much they weigh, how well they steer or the other components that make up the total package.
Then the new iFolly is released, you rush out to purchase a new status, and suddenly this observation becomes void. Funny That!
That's a sweeping assumption on your behalf, and you missed by a country mile.
Actually I came to the IP5 as an experiment after a Galaxy note. Naturally the fandroids will downvote this as a failing on my behalf, rather than - god forbid - find fault with the Note. But that's a very long post for another time.
That's you Obviously! hiding behind an anonymous mask isn't it. People buy products that best match their tastes, requirements and budget. There's nothing wrong with people choosing an iPhone just like there's nothing wrong with them choosing a Galaxy, a Blackberry or a HTC. It's only people like you who give fans a bad name.
Scott Earle,
I thought that as well, but didn't the Google Nexus 4 come out in October? Admittedly there were only 3 available to buy, and most people probably didn't get theirs until December/January...
But that's in the same time-frame as the iPhone 5, and about half the price. Although I believe only the direct from Google ones are quite so ridiculously cheap.
As happens, I don't really care. The Nokia Lumia 710 I used to own had a pretty crappy processor even by the standards of the cheap Androids at the time. But it was very fast, presumably due to having a less complicated UI, no multi-tasking - and perhaps more efficient code. It was also pretty nippy on the few apps I ran on it, and was the fastest thing to get a satnav lock that I've used.
Personally I think more than 2 or 3 apps multi-tasking is overrated on a phone, but then I don't use many apps. I prefer a tablet for those. For those that disagree, there's the top-end Androids.
And also the Note 2 was released September 2012.
(If people don't care about CPU or apps etc on a phone, then why consider one of the most expensive phones on the market in the first place? The low end Lumias do reportedly run well for a low cost - the point is that the iphone can't compete either on performance against high end devices, or on cost against low end devices.)
>The Nexus 4 is much cheaper - not dearer - than the Sony
Forgive me if a correction has been made to the article since your comment, but I read " but the former [The Xperia Z] is more than ₤200 ($US308, $AU334) more expensive than Google's offering." to mean the Sony was more expensive than the Google Nexus 4.
The article was just reporting tests made by Which? magazine using a certain benchmark... as people have observed, there are other factors that affect how the phone performs in the real world. Which normally do recommend Apple products over competitors, mainly because their readership is looking for tech reviews in a monthly magazine and not on a tech website. Anandtech would tell you that the iPhone5 rules 'Sunspider' tests (something to do with its cache, apparently), but I don't know how that affects real-world use.
Quite. Phones have reached the stage PCs did around 10 years ago: they're fast enough for anything a regular user wants with the possible exception of high end gaming.
I have an N4 and the missus has an iP5. I find her screen way too small, she hates Android. Never noticed any difference in speed in every day usage. These numbers are going to change anybody's mind about what to buy as their next phone.
"These numbers are going to change anybody's mind about what to buy as their next phone."
I'm not so sure. Firstly, maybe they can stop the media claiming the iphone as the best phone, even for hardware. And there are people who go "I want the best hardware, no matter what the cost", and then base it on what has been portrayed as top in the articles they've read.
More generally, people will wonder what they're getting for their money. Even if faster CPUs are entirely useless (not that I'd agree), people pay money to brag about it. Now they'll realise they'll look like mugs who paid more for something far slower.
@AC, then a smart phone is not for you...
I really hate having to boot up a PC to find an email, as often I book an event, get emailed confirmation, then a month later I am going, and I get in the car and think, damn what was that address.. its nice to be able to look up emails fast on the phone...
Sure my emails are stored on servers NOT on my phone, but the phone is an interface to my server!
"the Sony Xperia Z was only fractionally ahead of the Google Nexus 4, but the latter is more than ₤200 ($US308, $AU334) more expensive than Sony's offering."
vs original blog:
"Sony’s Xperia Z also did well to sneak into third place, finishing fractionally ahead of Google’s Nexus 4 mobile. Despite this the Nexus 4 is over £200 cheaper to buy SIM-free than the top three phones in our testing. "
Just pull your old feature phone out and use that then!
Modern *smartphones* aren't going to get the battery life you require until the battery technology catches up, or they start making them 5 x thicker and heavier to accommodate a much larger battery (which would probably take 24+ hours to charge!).
Modern *smartphones* aren't going to get the battery life you require until the battery technology catches up...
A partial solution is to get a grown up smartphone that allows you to remove the battery. My GS2 has a more than double capacity battery. Its replacement, whatever it turns out to be, will have a removable battery as well.
Or get a life and not spend all waking hours staring at the mobile. My ageing iPhone 4S can last four days, even five, doing just basic stuff such as a couple of short calls, SMSs, quick check of email, short use of GPS and map to find where I am lost, when away on a cycling or walking tour.
Of course, I learnt how to use it, turning off all the automatic stuff that no sensible person would leave on anyway, turning it on, e.g. wireless, only when I need it.
Of course, when at home, spending too long reading the news or whatever on the mobile while on the train or tram, it goes down to one and a half to two days. But then, my wife's old Nokia is not much better now that the battery is ageing (no, not keen to spend several times what I paid for the mobile just to get a replacement battery).
Actually my old "feature" phone (2005, Motorola) had far worse battery life than either my Nokia 5800 or Galaxy Nexus (the Nokia having the best battery life). Battery life is one of those things that goes up and down, and there is little difference between feature or smart except for the label used in marketing. It's dumb phones that have much better battery life.
"It's hardly surprising, of course, that a more expensive device with a 1.9 GHz quad-core processor would outperform the dual-core 1.2 GHz iPhone 5."
Here in the States on AT&T the 16GB iPhone 5 and Galaxy S4 are priced identically ($200), while the 32GB iPhone 5 is $50 more expensive ($300 vs $250) than the 32GB Galaxy S4.
You really shouldn't equate the "price" of a phone from a carrier with a contract, with the actual price of the phone SIM free and unlocked, which is how much it would actually cost to buy if you take the carrier and contract out of the equation.
Here in the UK, on my contract, I wouldn't pay a single penny for either an iPhone 5 or a Galaxy S4 at contract renewal, but that doesn't mean the phone is "free". A quick glance at the SIM free prices on Amazon(UK) shows the iPhone 5 @ £505, and the Samsung Galaxy S4 @ £450.
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Since Jelly Bean landed, my S3 has been very slick (seriously, it was born again). When I had a play with a iPhone 5, I didn't notice that it was less slick, or slower in any way. I know we're talking about the S4 here, but when I had a (very quick) play with one of these, I didn't notice a huge difference. Surely all the extra umph is only going to make a difference to gamers???
Sounds like the benchmark is heavy on multi-threading and the Samsung is a quad core. Don't PC benchmarks use real-world tests these days because of this (my i7 is likely slower than an up-to-date i3/5 with higher clock but shits on it in video encoding)? i.e. time to open app x, do task y etc etc. Sounds like phones need a similar routine.
Is measure CPU performance with code that is optimised for multiple threads. Purely on the numbers a 4 core 1.9GHz CPU should be 216% faster than a twin core 1.2GHz CPU, but then GHz as a measure of performance went out of fashion in the PC world over 10 years ago. It's also quite rare to find software that makes full use of threading (i.e. maxes out all cores), so both single threaded and multi-threaded numbers are important if absolute performance is to be compared.
In terms of user experience its a combination of factors that are important - CPU performance, GPU performance, UI speed and efficiency, battery life etc. Often there is a balance between factors (faster CPU = shorter battery life for example). In this respect Which? should be ashamed of themselves. The numbers presented are absolutely useless to the man in the street who they purport to serve and act only as bragging rights for the techie crowd.
this still doesnt help me.
I am trying to find a reason why I should buy a Samsung Galaxy S4 and a reason why I shouldnt get the HTC One.
The only reason I need to get either is down to my three year old phone finally giving up the ghost. Additionally, if I go for the S4 I will probably end up getting one given to me at work...
"The Samsung is built out of nasty plastic (not as nasty as the S3 though), and has a shite speaker."
What qualifies as nice plastic? Would it offend you if I said a phone used nasty weighty metal? (Half the smartphones I've seen have covers regardless) At least the Samsung phones have a lovely operating system that is intuative to use. Took me frickin ages ages to figure out the hold the button on an iPhone trick (I guess there would be a new user tutorial that I missed). I found myself handing the iPhones back to the owners to do stuff for me before I was shown about that. No wonder I bought an Android phone after retiring my Nokia 3310. I don't think I was conviced by people telling me iPhones are amazeballs. My previous experience was of Apple was somewhat biases against as a lab full of Apple iMac G3s kept crashing so we could not do our coursework at university. Oh and my iPod mini got unrecoverable unhappy face after 3 weeks. Apple not for me, doesn't work. Looks nice though?
Some people are unable to wear a watch as all from the cheapest to the dearest stop working on them. Perhaps you are like that with computers.
Not got one; but I believe that the most popular Samsungs run Android as the operating system. Perhaps you mean the UI. Hmm. Perhaps you are not technically aware enough to be allowed in a computing lab. or any kind that uses computers.
I've got OS X, IOS, Windows of various sorts (home and work), Linux (RH currently), Solaris and others. They all seem more or less all right. At home, no question, OS X is easiest, most reliable and has a good UNIX implementation (not a Linux imitation of UNIX).
I'm sorry for your loss. You own a mac. I got a first in a Computer Science BSc with honours and the G3 didn't help with the assembly language. FYI I don't own a watch as I have a really nice smartphone. I guess you'll be buying a shiney watch soon though, because it's amazeballs. I'll stick with Windows and Ubuntu for my needs as they work. OS X has a great shell but people seem to love it for emails and photo albums... you got your pet cat pictures sorted yet?
Such tests carry very little informative value. The most important set of benchmarks on any phone should be: how responsive its user interface; how user friendly it is; how secure is the device; how long does the battery last under full load; screen brightness and resolution, and perhaps now it is how good is the lens, sensor and firmware on the camera module.
Hardware performance benchmark otherwise has very little to offer unfortunately. Bottom line, your phone is not your desktop or laptop and you will not be doing some heavy duty number crunching on it, hence is fecking useless.
I am not Apple or Android fan but from having used them both iPhone beats any and Android device hands down. (Bring doen the down votes)
I am not Apple or Android fan but from having used them both iPhone beats any and Android device hands down. (Bring doen the down votes)
Serge 2,
Having played with, and read reviews of, the new Blackberry and owned a 'Droid, a Win Phone 7 and now on my first iPhone (a 5) - I can say they're all pretty much of a muchness now. They've all got their differences, strengths and weaknesses, but none of them now totally outshines the others.
Just in the last few months I've recommended a cheapie Windows Phone to a couple of people, a Samsung Galaxy Note to a mate who wants the stylus and big screen and an iPhone to someone else. It's horses-for-courses, and I'm not talking lasagne...
> The test results will also be a disappointment for BlackBerry ...
What, you don't think they ran their own benchmarks? Perhaps they just made the right trade-off; that big quad core CPU in the GS4 might not actually be that useful for anything but running artificial benchmarks, and the money and power saved that way can be used for other things.
Does it really matter that much now? phones are very fast, even my old SGS was fast enough to run 3D games!!
The S4 is blisteringly fast, BUT android is still a bit sluggish IMHO...
It is time they started to optimise what they have rather than go for new features all the time!
Samsung really can't write good apps... s-translate? junk, it CAN'T work offline with Chinese, so it won't do what was shown in the video!!!
[i]Samsung really can't write good apps... s-translate? junk, it CAN'T work offline with Chinese, so it won't do what was shown in the video!!![/i]
Samsung are very good at doing that... advertising things that it idealistically can do, but in reality can't. The pictures with sounds feature? WTF? What happened to the video? Trying to reinvent the wheel there again with no validation. Then the music sharing. Phones are personal devices and sharing your music with others is the last thing you want to do. Or may only do it once in the life of the phone.
Google/Android is all about being faster. Apple is all about being better/harder/stronger. IMHO, Android is faster at doing crap things.
As long as my BB10 phone calls, texts, e-mails reliably (which it does over iOS/Android); then that's what matters. It's a phone, not a multi-core wankerthon device.
Google translate app on the other hand DOES work offline, and I plan on trying it out in a few months when I spend 3 weeks in China without an internet connection (well without a mobile one anyway)
Music sharing, OK it works, but does not integrate with your normal music app, so its not just a case of share my music with X so we can listen to the same track while running...
The writer of the original Which? article should be taken out and shot - they can't even get the name of one of the phones right! I mean wtf is an Experia? They mean the Xperia I take it?
As an aside I'm quietly chuffed with my Z's results in this. Same hardware as the vanilla Nexus 4, yet ever so slightly quicker. Not enough to get too excited about, except if you repeat the tests underwater :)
And does this mean that the samsung actually works better with less swearing from the user who is p***d off at waiting days for something to happen? I don't have an iPhone and won't - in much the same way as I don't have the iphone clones that are being made today. I want a phone with a proper keyboard, a proper button to take a photo/video with, proper buttons to zoom etc. Most of all I want to press the buttons and have a reaction in a time I don't notice - instantly to my eye. What I hate - and hate more than anything else - is a smooth plate screen where you can't get anything done because you get no tactile feedback and the screen takes an age to update.
It makes me swear. It makes me swear when my computer takes 5 minutes to get to a usable state when I switch it on, it makes me angry when I want to take a photo on my camera phone and it takes it 10 keystrokes to unlock and find the camera app and 2 minutes for it to init the camera and be ready to shoot.. The 808 has a dedicated button to take a photo - it opens the app, sets the camera, focuses and takes the photo in less time than it takes me to find the camera app button on a Samsung. (And I've not tried an iPhone, but I'm pretty sure the experience is as dreadful on that as it is on the Samsung)
3 motions with my finger and that's photo taken on my iPhone. Press top button, swipe on the camera icon, click the volume button on the side and photo taken, saved and shared with my PC at home and my iPad for editing.
As opposed to my old Xperia, find the icon for the camera (seemed to move every other week). Select the camera app. Remove the battery to reset the phone as it's crashed for nth time that week. Repeat until it takes a photo. Then upload it using the USB cable. Throw the phone away as the USB port on the phone breaks and leaves you with an unchargable brick.
Press the power or home button, swipe to unlock. Press the camera icon (always in exactly the same place, every time), press screen to take photo.
Wait a couple of minutes (depends on wifi speed and photo size) and then marvel at the notification pop up on my laptop screen, telling me the photo had arrived. Also available on my Nexus, and probably every other pc, mac, iOS, Android, WinPhone or BB in the world, thanks to not being locked into any particular online storage system.
All from my Xperia.
1 extra press. Wow.
Can't remember the last time I plugged my phone into my laptop, probably just after I got it. Same for battery removal, probably to put the SD card in or sim.
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Can it get and hold reasonable signal strength in fringe reception areas?
Can it survive being dropped from head height onto concrete?
Can it survive being rained on or dropped into a toilet so it has to be rinsed off?
Will the battery last between reasonable charge opportunities?
Can I read the display clearly in bright sunlight?
I actually have no interest in its relative benchmark score. I am interested in stuff that makes a real difference.
right on from the comments "The problem is that Geekbench isn’t a real world test, doesn’t take account of differences between mobile operating systems, and doesn’t test graphical performance at all. As such, using it like this mostly just serves to give you a headline rather than meaningfully useful information for consumers about which devices will actually perform better during actual use. I kinda expected better from Which?. "
Whats the bets that the same benchmark will NOT be run when the next iPhone comes along?
2 issues...
1. why was a recently released phone compared to a year old one?
2. Why does Android need such high horsepower to make the OS/UI run, and still not give the same responsiveness as the year old iOS?
its like when the US car makers put an 8 litre engine in , and it still only achieves the same horsepower as some EU/Asia made cars with 3-4 litres ... nobody produces reports saying how great the US car is because of 8 litres, they trash it. But cant have that in the tech world.. .techies are insecure and unreasonable.
I'm with other posters for significant battery life improvements or even the ability to replace myself like I used to to with my first phone (6230i); I don't see either coming anytime soon. There are other's I'd like e.g. the next generation of GPS chips e.g. http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/CSR-launches-SiRFstarV-5e-GNSS-engine-7579.php but it seems that all I'm going to get is the bog standard one that has GPS and Glonass (to reduce import traffis)
As for Android it does seem odd that the phone manufacturers cripple the o/s by adding their own bloatware on top.
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"Here in the States on AT&T the 16GB iPhone 5 and Galaxy S4 are priced identically ($200), while the 32GB iPhone 5 is $50 more expensive ($300 vs $250) than the 32GB Galaxy S4."
LOL man, how can reprint marketing rubbish. That price is something like 24*$70+$200 = $1880.
That how it is in the UK. We talk real prices. And even the iPhone has to compete on prices here now(often only one third of the above), unlike the US with the monopoly like corporate alliance
I am surprised at Which doing something as irrelevant as benchmarking when their target audience is non-technical consumers.
I have a HTC One and an iPhone 5 at the side of me. In theory the HTC should wipe the floor with the iPhone on performance, and I'm sure it will on benchmarks, but in real world use i.e. opening apps, searching Google Maps, using Facebook, running games, it is almost always slower.
A shame because the HTC screen is a noticeable step up from "Retina" and the speakers are amazing, but it's going on eBay soon because in almost any real-world test it isn't as good as the iPhone.
"I am surprised at Which doing something as irrelevant as benchmarking when their target audience is non-technical consumers."
Their target is customers seeking the 'digested truth' devoid of marketing stuff. Stuff that often seems a compulsory obligation when coming from our own mouths.
This is a multithreaded benchmark... the quad-core chip "should" be twice as fast as the dual-core chip, not 91%...
So this means each iPhone core is still faster than the competition's cores? This is pretty startling news if true, considering when the chips were released and their relative clock speeds.
Since most of the code that deals with user interactions is single-threaded, that means the performance of the year-old iPhone 5 at normal phone tasks will be faster than the new Samsung flagship. I would be pretty embarrassed if I were Samsung.
No - this is the short answer.
Below is the long answer.
I would be pretty embarrassed if I was you - talking about things that i do not have a clue. In this particular case you do not have a clue of how much does the performance increase when adding of 1/2/3/etc. cores to the system. Google it.
"I would be pretty embarrassed if I was you - talking about things that i do not have a clue. In this particular case you do not have a clue of how much does the performance increase when adding of 1/2/3/etc. cores to the system. Google it."
In fact, as a software developer I have a firm grasp of how more cores can improve performance and that's why I posted what I did, namely, more cores do *not* improve the performance of typical cell phone tasks.
But since you suggested I Google, I did, and I found a bunch of cross-platform benchmark results for the iPhone 5 and the Galaxy 4 S. I'll post the links to some below but the upshot is that the iPhone is often faster and when it's slower, it's slower by less than 10%. So maybe you'd like to revise your opinion of how much those extra cores are helping?
http://www.idgconnect.com/abstract/1698/product-review-samsung-galaxy-s4-vs-iphone
http://www.indiatvnews.com/business/india/samsung-galaxy-s4-vs-apple-iphone-5-performance-and-camera-comp-6190.html
I have found Android tends to slow down over time, this is likely to be a software design problem (like the messages app loading all 3,000 of them into memory when I just want to read the latest) - at a guess. Part of me thinks it's probably down to Android running mostly Java software - is geek-bench written in Java, or did they use C/++?
So this will only people who play games, even then the G4 has more pixels to push, so who knows.
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