Fastest Smartphones – November 2011

Looking at just the specifications of the latest smartphones is becoming a little misleading. For example, Apple merely states that their iPhone 4S comes with a dual-core A5 processor … it doesn’t tell anyone that it is running at around 800Mhz. Similarly, dual-core processors and their respective chipsets vary a great deal in raw performance. The 1.2Ghz dual-core Qualcomm-powered HTC Sensation doesn’t perform nearly as well as the 1.2Ghz dual-core with Samsung’s Exynos chipset. Therefore you can no longer simply count cores or Ghz to judge the power of a modern smartphone.

Contrary to what many Web sites report, the iPhone 4S is not the fastest smartphone available. In fact, it isn’t even close. The only reason many people could claim otherwise is that the Android 2.3.x browser only utilises a single core of a processor, even when more than one is available. As soon as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus was reviewed, it quickly demolished the iPhone 4S … as did many other dual-core Android handsets using non-stock browsers like Opera.

I believe the fastest – currently available to buy – smartphone is the Motorola Droid RAZR, with its 1.2 GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU. There are faster Qualcomm-powered dual-core processors in terms of Ghz, but they had to bump up the CPU frequency to get close to Cortex-A9’s level of performance. If you classify the Samsung Galaxy Note as a smartphone and not a tablet, that would probably take the crown … although its larger screen and resolution may actually hinder its graphics rendering capabilities.

From what I can tell based on the evidence available, the fastest smartphones available are currently (in order of speed):

– Motorola Droid RAZR
– Samsung Galaxy Note
– Samsung Galaxy S2
– Samsung Galaxy Nexus
– HTC Sensation XE
– Apple iPhone 4S

Why not join the discussion? What is the fastest smartphone of 2011?