Android Authority ran Geekbench 2 on the new Samsung Galaxy S 4 last week and posted the results on YouTube. I thought it would be interesting to see how the Samsung Galaxy S 4 compares to other popular smartphones.
I've charted the Geekbench 2 scores for the Samsung Galaxy S4 along with several Android phones, the iPhone 5, and the BlackBerry Z10. If you're not familiar with Geekbench 2, higher scores are better.
Some things to consider when looking at the results:
It's clear that the Samsung Galaxy S 4 will be the fastest smartphone available when it is released in April. What's not clear is how the Galaxy S 4 will handle the increased power and cooling requirements that generally come with faster processors.
The Samsung Galaxy S 4 is twice as fast as the Samsung Galaxy S 3. Given that the Samsung Galaxy S 3 is less than a year old, that's a remarkable achievement. I am amazed at how quickly smartphone technology is improving.
The Samsung Galaxy S 4 is also twice as fast as the Apple iPhone 5. Apple has improved performance dramatically in the past (there was 2.5x increase in performance from the iPhone 4S to the iPhone 5). Will they be able to make a similar improvement for the next iPhone?
The Samsung Galaxy S 4 is also twice as fast as the BlackBerry Z10. However, unlike the Galaxy S 3 and the iPhone 5, the Z10 launched this year, not last year. Will BlackBerry feel compelled to release an updated handset with a faster processor sooner rather than later?
Android Authority only tested the Samsung Galaxy S 4 with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 SoC. We have no idea how the Samsung Galaxy S 4 with the new Exynos 5 Octa SoC will perform, but given how the different Samsung Galaxy S 3s performed I imagine the Geekbench score will be similar.
Both the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S 4 use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 SoC, although the HTC One runs at a slower speed (1.7 GHz vs. 1.9 GHz). The HTC One is also running an older version of Android (4.1.2 vs. 4.2.2), so the HTC One's performance should improve slightly once it is on the latest version of Android.
Again, I'm amazed at how quickly smartphone performance has improved. We've gone from the original iPhone with a Geekbench score of 130 to the Samsung Galaxy S 4 with a Geekbench score of 3100 in only six years.