LG G4 Review: A Competent, Capable Android Alternative

Next, we'll take a look at how the LG G4 compares to other smartphones by examining a few benchmarks that are currently available in the Android Marketplace. 

First, let’s take a look at the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. According to the SunSpider website:

This benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, not the DOM or other browser APIs. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other. Unlike many widely available JavaScript benchmarks, this test is: 

Real World - This test mostly avoids microbenchmarks, and tries to focus on the kinds of actual problems developers solve with JavaScript today, and the problems they may want to tackle in the future as the language gets faster. This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more examples. There are a few microbenchmarkish things, but they mostly represent real performance problems that developers have encountered.

Balanced - This test is balanced between different areas of the language and different types of code. It's not all math, all string processing, or all timing simple loops. In addition to having tests in many categories, the individual tests were balanced to take similar amounts of time on currently shipping versions of popular browsers.

Statistically Sound - One of the challenges of benchmarking is knowing how much noise you have in your measurements. This benchmark runs each test multiple times and determines an error range (technically, a 95% confidence interval). In addition, in comparison mode it tells you if you have enough data to determine if the difference is statistically significant.

JavaScript testing JavaScript Android and iPhone testing

In the past, we’ve noticed that the Chrome browser is typically slower than other browsers in this test, and we're seeing it here. Still, it bested the Chrome browser on Samsung's Galaxy S6 Edge. It should be noted that more phones on the Android side are now shipping with Chrome and Chrome alone. In fact, LG G4 has its own Internet icon, but once you click it, it informs you that "Internet is now Chrome," and you're pointed to the one and only browser that ships from the factory. (Those who wish to mix it up can of course download Opera, Firefox, or any other from Google Play.)

We relied on Chrome for this test as well. Surprisingly, it notched a class-leading score here, putting it among the top contenders. For what it's worth, real-world browsing performance was incredibly speedy, with even complex pages that weren't optimized for mobile devices.