Samsung Galaxy S 4 Review: Bigger, Faster, Stronger

Next up, we have some numbers from 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

The Galaxy Note II's combination of Jelly Bean and a fast Quad-Core SoC put up the best Sunspider score we've seen from an Android device as well. The iPhone 5 and Nokia Lumia 920 (Windows Phone) had previously held the top spots in this benchmark on mobile device, but not anymore.

Rightware Browsermark Web Browsing Performance

The Samsung Galaxy S 4 put up an excellent score in Rightware's Browsermark too. The iPhone 5 blew everything out of the water upon its release last year, but the Samsung Galaxy S 4 was able to overtake the iPhone 5 and outpace every other smartphone we have tested, with the exception of the LG Optimus G.

We should point out that we tested the S 4 with its stock browser and with Google Chrome, but have reported the score with the stock browser here, since it offered higher performance.