Galaxy S6 ranks first in a "real world" speed test

Knowing all about your future smartphone’s potential performance is a useful bit of purchasing information. However synthetic benchmarks have their issues, so perhaps it’s best to look to some real world speed tests to get a feel for how a handset performs in its day-to-day tasks.

Tom’s Guide has stuck some leading pieces of smartphone hardware up against one other in a range of tests. Here’s the list of the handsets and chip-sets that took part:

• Samsung Galaxy S6 (Exynos 7420)
• HTC One M9 (Snapdragon 810)
• LG G4 (Snapdragon 808)
• Google Nexus 6 (Snapdragon 805)
• ASUS ZenFone 2 (Intel Atom Z3580)
• iPhone 6 (Apple A8)

To summarise the results, the Galaxy S6 finished first in the vast majority of the benchmarks, putting in a particularly strong performance in the real world examples, such as PDF loading and camera app opening times. The LG G4 finished second, putting in a good performance in everything but the 3D graphics based categories. The Adreno 418 was always going to have a tougher time pushing pixels to a QHD display, however it only lags 1 frame behind the leading handsets in the Asphalt 8 real world gaming test. Both of these handsets outperform Apple’s iPhone 6 on average throughout.

Another contentious point worth noting is that the stock Android Google Nexus 6 game in last in the majority of the real world tests, consistently opening apps much slower than all of the other handsets. The Intel Atom powered Zenfone 2 may have finished last overall, but actually performed faster than the Nexus 6 is a number of scenarios, suggesting rather good performance per dollar from the ASUS handset.

Moving back to the winner, the reason for the Galaxy S6’s success doesn’t just come from its SoC package. Samsung has produced a very well-rounded piece of hardware. The company included faster LPDDR4 memory (as does the One M9), as well as UFS 2.0 flash storage for faster read and write speeds in its latest model, which probably explains the faster PDF opening times.

If you’re looking for the best performing smartphone on the market right now, the Samsung Galaxy S6 appears to be the handset for you.