With the release of the Galaxy S9, many were looking forward to the fastest phone in history. The Galaxy S9 lags behind the iPhone X, but the Galaxy S9 Plus has managed to unseat Apple’s flagship as the fastest phone on the market.
A large part of the appeal of the iPhone X was the unique FaceID technology – a never-before-seen improvement to facial recognition technology that adapts to changes in appearance, allowing users to unlock their phone with ease despite changes in appearance such as a new pair of glasses or the growth of facial hair. However, despite all the bells and whistles, many smartphone enthusiasts were looking for one main thing: an increase in power.
While the majority of phones use some variant of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips, Apple is relatively unique in that they develop their own line of chips. The A11 Bionic chip proved to be the most powerful on the market, catapulting the iPhone X above the competition as the fastest phone around.
However, Samsung has always been neck and neck with Apple in terms of performance – often coming out ahead of the Cupertino-based tech giant in areas such as screen quality and customizability. The Galaxy S9 unfortunately continues to fall behind the iPhone X and its A11 Bionic chip, but the Galaxy S9 Plus comes out ahead as one of the fastest mobile devices on the market.
Although many were looking forward to the release of the Galaxy S9 Plus, experts were skeptical as to whether it could outplay the iPhone X that had become so dominant in terms of performance and features. A recent speed test proves otherwise, however, with the Galaxy S9 Plus snagging the title of the fastest phone on the market in a number of different benchmarks.
A cell phone speed test is compared by taking two or more phones, connecting them to the same wireless network with the same apps and arranging them in the same way on the home screen. Once that’s done, you run two different launch tests.
The first test of the speed test gives a sense of how fast each phone loads an application. The second focuses on how fast an app is reloaded by memory – meaning the speed at which you can swap between apps like you would throughout the course of a day. The Galaxy S9 Plus and iPhone X speed test included a mix of apps that were able to load immediately as well as resource-intensive games that push the capabilities of the cell phone to its limits.
The speed test of the Galaxy S9 Plus and the iPhone X was carried out by the YouTube channel EverythingApplePro which runs a speed test with every major release. It turns out that with this testing, the Galaxy S9 Plus does pull out ahead.
The iPhone X won the first test due to its ability to process 4K videos faster than the Galaxy S9 Plus, but Samsung’s phone was no chump either – and it shined on the second test due to the increase in RAM. While the iPhone X has an extremely speedy processor, it does fall behind in terms of power due to only featuring 3GB of RAM when compared to the 6GB we saw on the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus. Because of this disparity, the speed at which Samsung’s flagship was able to swap between apps was noticeably better than that of the iPhone X. It’s also worth mentioning that with the iOS 11 update, Apple has had issues with memory issues that have yet to be addressed.
The video below shows benchmark tests between the two phones, and the Galaxy S9 Plus performs extremely well.
It turns out that if you’re looking for the fastest phone on the market in day-to-day performance, your best bet is the Galaxy S9 Plus rather than the iPhone X. While the X did pull ahead in the first test, it was only by a slim margin and the S9 Plus performed noticeably better in the second test.
At the end of the day, both of the phones are extremely capable and will provide performance that is more than adequate for the vast majority of users. However, if speed is desired above all else, there’s a new phone in town that edges out the competition: The Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus.