Which smartphone is the fastest?

If you own the iPhone 5 and feel that the phone is slow compared to your friend's Samsung Galaxy S4 - you are not wrong. In fact, the iPhone5 is twice as slow as the Galaxy S4, according to a recent 'speed test' conducted by a Which?, a UK research company.

The phone's speed is usually something visual that we experience. How long it takes for applications to open or how long it takes the phone to respond when you push a button. However, this can be very subjective. So in order to test the overall performance of the phone, techies need to look under the hood and ignore all the fuzzy stuff, such as preference for a brand or software features the device has versus another, or the size of the phone, etc.

The only way to test a phone compared to another phone is by using benchmarking software. Benchmarking software conducts a very specific battery of tests on the phone. Each test looks at a specific element of the device and gives it a score. The scores are totalled and the device is ranked compared to other devices that have undergone the exact same set of tests using the same testing software.

The benchmarking software is a scientific test and has no bias for or against the device and no user input is required that can skew the results. Each device is tested in the identical manner and for the same elements.

Which? used Geekbench 2, which uses a number of different benchmarks to measure performance. They include:

* Integer benchmarks, which measure the processor's ability to process integer data, ie whole numbers and text.

* Floating-point benchmarks, which measure the performance of the processor's floating point unit (FPU). For example, spreadsheets and graphics applications are intensive floating point applications.

* Memory benchmarks, which measure not only the performance of the underlying memory hardware, but also the performance of the functions provided by the operating system used to manipulate memory.

* Stream benchmarks, which measure both floating point performance and sustained memory bandwidth.

Here are the results Which? Arrived at when it looked at the top brands of mobile phones:

Before you shoot the messenger... benchmarking is a technical test of the device hardware and software. It does not mean one phone is better or worse, as this test does not take into account ease of use, device size, features the phone has or doesn't have.

In the mobile race of companies trying to outdo each other, the phone performances are continuously improving, which results in the consumer having access to better and faster devices.

We are used to 'instant gratification' and we are expecting our phones to do more than they ever before, so we now need to ask about the phone's performance as part of our growing list of questions when we evaluate which phone to buy.

As if it wasn't hard enough already...