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Galaxy Nexus outdoes iPhone in browsing, but not graphics

The upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich Google phone renders Web pages faster, but can't keep up with Apple's GPU.

Eric Mack Contributing Editor
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2 min read

With a new Google phone--and the first one to be delivered with Android 4.0 Ice Cream sandwich--on the horizon, the iPhone 4S rivalry is inevitable, and we've got some benchmark data to fan the flames of the feud.

The soon-to-be-released Samsung Galaxy Nexus has been run through the benchmark gauntlet and AnandTech compiled the results to find it bested all comers in the web browsing department.

The Google phone was put through a pair of browsing benchmarks--Sunspider Javascript Benchmark 0.9.1 and Rightware Browsermark--and it came out with the top results in both cases, ahead of the Droid RAZR running Gingerbread and iPhone 4S running iOS 5, which swapped turns in the 2nd and 3rd place spots.

The Galaxy Nexus running Ice Cream Sandwich melted all the competition in the browsing department. AnandTech

All this means that the Galaxy Nexus appears to render Web pages faster than all the other leading phones on the market right now. Anand credits a combination of a fast processor and software enhancements in Ice Cream Sandwich:

The CPU side of things is comparable to Apple's A5, although the cores are clocked noticeably higher than the 800MHz we saw in the iPhone 4S....The real advantage the Galaxy Nexus has is on the software side. All of the goodness of Honeycomb makes its way to a handset along with even further optimization work. One of the early Galaxy Nexus owners ran the usual browser benchmarks on his phone and shared the results with us. Google has obviously done a lot of browser optimization in ICS as performance is now better than even Honeycomb.

It's not a complete victory for the Galaxy Nexus however. It wasn't able to keep up with the iPhone 4S in the graphics department. In fact it was significantly out done by the beefier GPU in the latest iPhone in two framerate benchmark tests:

AnandTech

It should be noted that the Galaxy Nexus should still have plenty of GPU heft to deliver a fine experience, and that benchmark data doesn't always hold up in a real world full of bottlenecked networks and buggy apps. But I'll save that for a later chapter in this tale of yet another epic gadget feud.

Via: Gizmodo.