Like we weren’t excited about the Galaxy Nexus enough already. The crew at AnandTech has been busily benchmarking Android’s new flagship against Apple’s top performer. The results? The Galaxy Nexus is the new king of the hill in some key areas.
In the SunSpider Javascript Benchmark (version 0.9.1) the Galaxy Nexus scored a very speedy 1879 versus the iPhone 4S’s 2250. Obviously, lower is better in this test. The Nexus also outperformed the 4S in the Rightware BrowserMark test, scoring 98,272 versus the 4S’s 87,841 (higher is better). The translation of this clusterflock of numbers is that page rendering on the Galaxy Nexus should be faster. Experientially, our Mat Honan found web browsing on the Nexus to be very quick indeed. The thing is the processor on the Galaxy Nexus is nothing otherworldly, which means that Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) has made some serious software enhancements. In other words, when ICS comes to a phone or tablet with beefier specs it’s going to give you whiplash.
But don’t worry, Apple fans, when it came to the graphics processing benchmarks the iPhone 4S and the iPad 2 both beat the Galaxy Nexus. The Nexus did extremely well, just not as well. This means that, theoretically, gaming performance and other graphically intensive tasks should be slightly better on those iDevices. You can see all of the numbers over at AnandTech.
Benchmarking is a handy tool to give you relative, objective numbers about how a device performs. That said, these numbers don’t always translate to user experience. I’ve tested phones that benchmarked well, but then were slow and terrible to use in practice. However, in this case preliminary testing of the Galaxy Nexus has been extremely favourable (as it has been with the iPhone 4S, obviously), so it’s nice to hear that there are some raw numbers to back up these first impressions. [AnandTech via 9to5Mac]