Apple's iOS 4 Benchmarked: Is It Faster?

The new iOS 4 for the iPhone and iPod touch promises 100 new features, but we weren't sure if one of them would be speed. We're still not sure. After running some preliminary benchmarks on an iPhone 3GS and an iPod touch (3rd generation), we found mixed results with iOS 4, which made some tests run slightly faster and others slightly slower.

Part of the ambiguity may be because the two native benchmarking apps we use, BenchTest and Benchmark, haven't yet been updated for iOS 4. So they aren't using the latest features. Along with those two native apps, we also tried two tests of Web browser processing power and checked how long it took to launch a complex game.

Overall, iOS 4 did seem to have a positive effect on program launch times - the game "Need for Speed Undercover" launched noticeably faster on both devices with iOS 4 than iOS 3. But we got very uneven results from the benchmarks and browser tests.

So we wouldn't look for dramatically greater speed from iOS 4 apps. Rather, the iOS 4 upgrade is about new features, most notably multitasking. For a full list of iOS 4's features, check out the iOS 4 release notes which we've reproduced here on PCMAG.com.

We'll redo these benchmarks when we get the new iPhone 4 later this week.

Here are the highlights of our benchmarking results and details of the tests we used.

BenchTest 1.4 ($0.99 in the iTunes store) tests memory allocation, floating point and integer calculation, 2D drawing performance using CoreGraphics, filesystem writes and some JavaScript functions.

Benchmark 1.0 ($0.99 in the iTunes store) just measures the time to create 100,000 objects in memory.

"NFSU Launch" is the time for the device to launch "Need for Speed Undercover 1.2.0" ($4.99 in the iTunes store) to playable mode.

SunSpider and V8 (version 5) are complex JavaScript benchmarks that test JavaScript runtime performance. Not all of the devices could run the entire V8 suite, so we picked two of their tests, "Richards" and "EarlyBoyer" as representative.

All tests were run with devices connected to a Wi-Fi network.

Click the image to the top left for the full tests.

About Our Expert

Sascha Segan

Former Lead Analyst, Mobile

My Experience

I'm that 5G guy. I've actually been here for every "G." I reviewed well over a thousand products during 18 years working full-time at PCMag.com, including every generation of the iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy S. I also wrote a weekly newsletter, Fully Mobilized, where I obsessed about phones and networks.

My Areas of Expertise

US and Canadian mobile networks
Mobile phones released in the US
iPads, Android tablets, and ebook readers
Mobile hotspots
Big data features such as Fastest Mobile Networks and Best Work-From-Home Cities

The Technology I Use

Being cross-platform is critical for someone in my position. In the US, the mobile world is split pretty cleanly between iOS and Android. So I think it's really important to have Apple, Android and Windows devices all in my daily orbit.

I use a Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 for work and a 2021 Apple MacBook Pro for personal use. My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra, although I'm probably going to move to an Android foldable. Most of my writing is either in Microsoft OneNote or a free notepad app called Notepad++. Number crunching, which I do often for those big data stories, is via Microsoft Excel, DataGrip for MySQL, and Tableau.

In terms of apps and cloud services, I use both Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive heavily, although I also have iCloud because of the three Macs and three iPads in our house. I subscribe to way too many streaming services.

My primary tablet is a 12.9-inch, 2020-model Apple iPad Pro. When I want to read a book, I've got a 2018-model flat-front Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. My home smart speakers run Google Home, and I watch a TCL Roku TV. And Verizon Fios keeps me connected at home.

My first computer was an Atari 800 and my first cell phone was a Qualcomm Thin Phone. I still have very fond feelings about both of them.

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