Samsung’s brand new flagship smartphones for the first half of 2015 are just weeks away from launching, and Android fans are clearly excited. They have great cause for excitement, of course, since the new Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge represent a complete departure for Samsung, which designed its new flagship phones from the ground up. The result is a pair of premium smartphones the likes of which we’ve never seen from the South Korean consumer electronics giant.
As excitement continues to build ahead of the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge’s April 10th release, we constantly see new comparisons pop up that pit the S6 against the reigning smartphone champ, Apple’s iPhone 6. One comparison may be of particular interest, however: A new speed test that focuses on real-world usage.
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If you look at the specs on paper, the Galaxy S6 absolutely crushes the iPhone 6. Samsung’s new phone features the most powerful mobile octa-core processor the world has ever seen, 3GB of new LPDDR4 RAM, UFS 2.0 flash storage that is faster than anything that has come before it, and plenty more.
Benchmark performance tests tell a similar story, with the Galaxy S6 outperforming last year’s iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus by a shockingly wide margin.
But how does all that translate to real-world speed and performance?
In an effort to answer that question, YouTube user AndroidGameE created a speed test that involves opening the same series of apps on both the Galaxy S6 — the edge model, in this case — and the iPhone 6. Both devices are running a timer in the background, and the tests end when the timer is reopened and stopped.
Now, a test like this is not without flaws. Many apps involved in the test are third-party apps, so “speed” in this case relies on the ability of the developers who created the apps, as well as the power of the phones themselves.
Then again, this is a real-world test that uses popular real-world world apps and games. All of these factors impact the user experience, so why not account for them in tests?
The full video is embedded below. While we won’t post any spoilers, we will say that the results are shockingly close and may surprise you.
