PC Mag says Apple iPhone 5 is the fastest smartphone in the land

More than twice as fast as any previous Apple iPhone model (even when updated to iOS 6), faster than the Samsung Galaxy S III and faster than the new Motorola DROID RAZR M, the Apple iPhone 5 is the fastest smartphone on earth. That is according to PC Magazine's exhaustive study of benchmark tests run on the 6th generation of Apple's iconic smartphone and on other handsets. 

The fastest smartphone on earth?

The Apple iPhone 5 stood out on JavaScript tests, something that we told you a few days ago, before PCMag made public all of their results. On the Sun-Spider JavaScript benchmark site, the Apple iPhone 5 set a new record for performance. In addition, the iPhone 5's triple-core GPU technology allowed the phone to double the score of the Motorola DROID RAZR M in certain graphics benchmark tests. In Geekbench scores, the iPhone 5 more than doubled the results from the Apple iPhone 4S, showing that Apple wasn't kidding when they said the new phone was twice as fast as its predecessor. Streaming video tests showed the Apple iPhone 5 doubling the Apple iPhone 4S and in memory, the newer phone tripled the score of the older model. Against the original Apple iPhone, the new model is 20 times faster when browsing, almost 20 times faster with graphics and 5 times faster with JavaScript.

Ever since the Apple iPhone 5 was announced, the A6 chipset which powers it has been something of a riddle. With Apple mentioning nothing on the exact specifications, we had to wait another week to find the core count and architecture, as well as the RAM amount and GPU model.

Now however, we got to learn the rest of the A6 secrets, thanks to a detailed review of its performance, courtesy of Anandtech. The suspicion that Apple went for a custom CPU architecture was confirmed and we learned that its maximum clock speed is 1.2GHz. The rest of the A6 specs highlights include 1GB of RAM and a PowerVR SGX 543MP3 three-core GPU.

More importantly, however, we found out how those perform in real life and how the iPhone 5 compares to the other iOS products and the Android top dogs.