Apple and Samsung are head and shoulders above all other smartphone manufacturers in many aspects, especially when it comes to market share where the two tech giants captured nearly 40% of the smartphone market in the fourth quarter of 2017. The two brands are often seen as the pinnacle of smartphone technology and in the past, Apple’s iPhones have been faster than all other smartphones even Samsung’s flagship phones. However, Samsung has not only caught up to Apple, but the South Korean electronics company surpassed iPhones with their latest Galaxy 9 handset.
The Samsung Galaxy S9+ was put to several speed tests against the Apple iPhone X and the Android phone came out on top. The real-life usage tests were performed by the YouTube channel EverythingApplePro. They connected both phones to the same wireless network, install the same apps, and arrange them in the same order on the home screen. Then they ran different app launch “laps.” The first lap finds out how fast each phone loads applications, then the second lap is how fast the app is reloaded from memory. The test included various apps from ones that load immediately to mobile games that suck up resources. The speed test also gauges biometrics performance and wireless data speeds.
The iPhone is powered by A11 Bionic chip, while the S9+ utilizes Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845. These results are for the Galaxy S9 Plus, which is faster than the regular S9 because the Plus has 6GB of RAM compared to 4GB of RAM for the S9. The iPhone X only has 3GB of RAM. The Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus barely outperformed the iPhone X in most of the various speed tests.
Tom’s Guide also performed a speed test to see how quickly websites and apps download. In these tests, the Galaxy S9 Plus was significantly faster than the Apple iPhone X. The Galaxy S9 Plus also beat the iPhone X in these speed tests. Both handsets were using T-Mobile and the S9 Plus manhandled the iPhone X. The S9 Plus had an “Average Download Speed” of 71.6 Mbps compared to the X’s 48.8 Mbps. Samsung had an “Average Upload Speed” of 10.1 Mbps compared to Apple’s 7.7 Mbps. “Video Download Time” saw the S9 Plus do it in 18.8 seconds and the iPhone X at 35.9 seconds. Lastly, the S9 Plus had a “Photo Upload Time” of 20.7 seconds and the iPhone X did so in 44.4 seconds. The S9 Plus supports up to 1.2 Gbps speeds whereas the Apple iPhone X is rated at 1 Gbps. In the battle of the fastest phones on the planet, Samsung beat out Apple in the S9 Plus Vs. iPhone X matchup.