The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus have made headlines of late for their blazing-fast performance, blowing pretty much every other phone out of the water when it comes to benchmarks. Benchmarks, however, are a little limited, and don’t always show how the phone performs in the real world. So is the iPhone 7 faster in the real world? According to a speed test conducted by PhoneBuff, the answer seems to be a resounding “yes.”
The test pits the iPhone 7 against the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 — one of the more powerful Android phones to hit shelves this year. In the test, each phone is used to open up a series of popular and processor-intensive apps. A video shows the test in time lapse.
As you can see in the video (below), the iPhone 7 doesn’t just completely dominate against the Galaxy Note 7 — it laps it by completing its second run of opening the apps before the Galaxy S7 has even finished its first. That’s despite the fact that the iPhone 7 has a mere 2GB of RAM compared to the Galaxy Note 7’s 4GB. It somewhat confirms Apple’s claim that designing software and hardware together improves performance and means the phone can perform well with less RAM.
In the end, the iPhone 7 finishes two runs of opening up the apps in a speedy 1 minute 40 seconds, while the Galaxy Note 7 takes almost twice as long, with a time of 3 minutes 14 seconds.
The results aren’t all that surprising. Even the iPhone 6S beats out the Galaxy Note 7 in PhoneBuff’s tests. Still, many are hoping that the new Snapdragon 821 processor and the new series of Google Pixel phones will be able to salvage some of Android’s power prowess. The new phones are expected to launch some time in early October.
