Mobile benchmark site AnTuTu posted a list of the top 10 smartphones that deliver the best performance, and the results may surprise some fanboys.
The top spots are not occupied by Apple flagships nor other powerhouses from Samsung, LG or HTC. No, the top spots are filled by Chinese smartphones that retail at a fraction of the cost of comparable flagships from heavyweight OEMs.
Leading the charge for the month of May 2016 in AnTuTu's Top 10 Best Performance Smartphones is the Vivo Xplay 5 Elite, followed by LeEco Max 2 and Lenovo Zuk Z2 Pro. Rounding up the top 5 are the Xiaomi Mi 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge.
A worthy note here is that all of these five handsets run Qualcomm's powerful Snapdragon 820 processor but with a difference in RAM. The smartphones occupying the top three spots pack 6 GB of RAM, while those on the fourth and fifth spots come with 4 GB of RAM. This goes to prove that even with the same processor, RAM can make a significant difference in processing power.
The three powerhouses with 6 GB of RAM — the Vivo Xplay 5 Elite, the LeEco Max 2 and the Lenovo Zuk Z2 Pro — scored roughly 137,861 points on average. Meanwhile, the Xiaomi Mi 5 and the Galaxy S7 edge scored 135,686 on average with the lower 4 GB of RAM.
The difference may not be groundbreaking, but that extra RAM allows for multiple apps to be loaded at the same time, translating to smaller delays upon switching between apps that take a heavy toll on processing.
The other five positions in the top 10 are filled by the iPhone 6s, iPhone SE, LG G5, Meizu Pro 6 and Honor V8, respectively.
All in all, it seems that Chinese OEMs are rapidly closing in on big-brand smartphone makers such as Apple and Samsung, and the flagships they come up with are real powerhouses that can take even the Galaxy S7 edge or iPhone 6s in terms of performance.
Brand loyalty is still strong, however, and we don't see iPhones or Galaxy flagships falling out of fashion anytime soon even though cheaper and more powerful Chinese smartphones are gaining ground.
That said, there's a good reason why all of these smartphones are in AnTuTu's top 10: they're all packed with top-notch specs and features and can handle virtually any task you throw at them. If you have any thoughts on the matter, feel free to share them in the comment section below.
