Although benchmarks have already shown that the iPhone 6 has raw performance gains over the current competition, this video by PhoneBuff highlights what this advantage means in a real word test of loading a variety of apps and switching between them. Due to the differences between Android and iOS, the tester uses equivalent apps as closely as possible.
In total, the iPhone took 1 minute 55 seconds to load and multitask between the 30 apps tested, whereas the M8 was about 10 seconds slower. The Galaxy S5 lagged significantly, taking over a minute longer than the iPhone to complete the test at 2 minutes 58 seconds.
The test launches a mixture of apps and games, and then repeats opening each one to see how effective the phone can multitask. The iPhone’s 1 GB of RAM shows here, as it has to reload a decent number of the apps completely from scratch. However, the underlying CPU performance of Apple’s SoC means that it can still win the test, simply by loading the apps quickly.
Obviously, the test is rather unscientific from a raw numbers perspective, but it does offer a reasonable approximation of real-world performance differences between the iPhone 6 and the high-end offerings from Android. Choosing different apps to test would also likely yield different winners and losers.
Much of the slowdown seen in the Galaxy S5 is due to TouchWiz. Android users willing to customize and tweak the system will be able to eek out a better result. This is simply a test of how most users will experience app launching from a newly-purchased system. Watch one of our previous videos to see how the iPhone 6 compares to previous iPhones.