Apple's iPhone 5 is 50% Slower Than Samsung's Galaxy S IV

Samsung may have received a few complaints from bloggers and analysts for unveiling a predictable phone last week, but the company had one surprise no one saw coming. The surprise was so secret that the South Korean tech giant did not even bother to mention it during the last press event. Instead, Samsung has allowed independent testers to unearth the details. According to Business Insider, a new benchmark test found that the Galaxy S IV is twice as fast as Apple's AAPL iPhone 5. Geekbench, a tool from Primate Labs that provides a "comprehensive set of benchmarks engineered to quickly and accurately measure processor and memory performance," was used to test Samsung's new handset, along with a series of other smartphones. "Higher Geekbench scores are better, where twice the score means twice the performance," John Poole, founder of Primate Labs, wrote in a blog post. Poole said that he is "amazed at how quickly smartphone performance has improved." "We've gone from the original iPhone with a Geekbench score of 130 to the Samsung Galaxy S 4 with a Geekbench score of 3100 in only six years," he wrote in another post. In this instance, Poole was rounding down. The Galaxy S IV actually received a score of 3163. Only one handset came close to matching that device's performance -- the HTC One, whose score came in at 2687. LG and Google's GOOG Nexus 7 earned 2040 points. The six-month-old iPhone 5 is still in the top five, earning 1596 points. That's 148 points less than the four-core version of the Galaxy S III, which came in fourth place. BlackBerry's BBRY Z10, one of the newest phones on the list, received a score of only 1480. This made Poole wonder if BlackBerry would be inspired to release an "updated handset with a faster processor" to compete with Samsung. While these benchmarks are very revealing, they are already being dismissed by some users. When AndroidAuthority (which used Geekbench to perform the first Galaxy S IV test results) published a video on YouTube, BlackBerry fans quickly chimed in to defend their beloved handset. "If you really wanted to do a good and fair comparison, why not starting from the OS level?" one user, who goes by the name Nshuti57109, questioned. "I notice that they didn't compare that os's at all," Alicia Shepherd wrote. "Would this show a down fall to the new s4? From what I have seen it's pretty much just s3." Alex Bass was even more critical of the test results. "You're completely ignoring the OS's, which is the biggest part of it all," he wrote. "…The benchmark is processor heavy, means NOTHING to the OS. Terrible test." Louis Bedigian is the Senior Tech Analyst and Features Writer of Benzinga. You can reach him at 248-636-1322 or louis@benzingapro.com. Follow him @LouisBedigianBZ