Samsung fans have always touted the ultra high-end specs and top-of-the-line benchmark scores on their favorite smartphones, pitting it against Apple's seemingly paltry specs for the iPhone.
But specs and benchmarks don't always offer the real picture when it comes to the speed and performance of a smartphone. In fact, Apple has time and time again demonstrated with its iPhones that looking good on paper is not as important as actually performing well in real life.
The latest iPhone 6s Plus once again demonstrates that, although it may not have the octa-core Exynos 7420 chipset and the 4 GB of RAM that is present on the Galaxy Note 5, it still manages to trump the Samsung phablet in speed and performance. As a recap, the iPhone 6s Plus runs on Apple's dual-core A9 chipset (manufactured by Samsung and TSMC) paired with 2 GB of RAM, two times less than what is available on the Galaxy Note 5.
In a real-world performance test by PhoneBuff, which is known for pitting high-end flagships against each other in a virtual race to open and run apps, the iPhone 6s Plus and Galaxy Note 5 compete against each other in a speed match, where a series of apps are opened and left running in the background so that the next app can be opened.
The first lap sees both phones neck-and-neck, but the iPhone 6s Plus manages to get ahead of its competition by a slight two seconds, finishing the race at 49 seconds, while the Galaxy Note 5 topped off at 51 seconds. However, the second lap saw the iPhone running away with a whopping 16-second lead over the Galaxy Note 5, as the iPhone simply has to bring up apps open in the background while the Galaxy Note 5 has to open them up again.
The considerable difference can be attributed to the fact that Apple maintains full control of its software, allowing it to reconfigure iOS so it can use resources more efficiently. Samsung, meanwhile, uses Android, and Google doesn't let OEMs take full control of Android, so while the Galaxy Note 5 has a bigger processor and more RAM, it is not fully optimized to use all resources as efficiently as the iPhone does.
Therefore, if the difference lies in the software instead of the specs sheet, the true test of performance should be between the iPhone 6s Plus and the Nexus 6P. Nonetheless, the Galaxy Note 5 is deemed in benchmark tests the best-performing Android phablet, and if the iPhone 6s Plus is much faster than the Galaxy Note 5, then it's faster than most other smartphones available today.
Check out how the iPhone 6s Plus leaves the Galaxy Note 5 in the dust in PhoneBuff's real-world test below.
