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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.

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