How to test your tablet or phone speed

With the latest speed benchmarking apps, you’ll be able to show off to your friends by having the fastest device in town.

When you buy the latest Samsung Galaxy S III, HTC One X or a Google Nexus 7 it’s reassuring to know that it’s as fast as you’d hoped for.

Testing how fast a phone or tablet can run is called benchmarking, a few established apps provide an ideal way to test your device’s speed and compare it against the best of the rest.

Here are our recommendations:

Vellamo

VellamoThe latest benchmark app for Android is called Vellamo and you can install it for free from the Google Play Store.

Developed by Qualcomm this is the company that designs and manufactures some of the most widely used phone and tablet processors, so it should know what it’s doing.

This latest version of Vellamo has been updated to fully test browser speeds running HTML5 tests, plus a suite of dedicated processor speed-tests that are called Metal.

An Extras section also includes streaming video tests. The tests can take a while to run but once complete you can compare your results with a host of other devices.

AnTuTu

AnTuTuOne of the most widely used benchmarks for Android devices is called AnTuTu and it’s free on the Google Play Store.

Everyone loves a big number and AnTuTu provides just that, from its comprehensive range of tests – that drive everything from the 3D graphics to the processor as hard as possible – it manages to derive an overall score for your device.

You’re then ranked against a raft of other popular devices or you can upload it to the online rankings.

Geekbench 2

Geekbench 2How do you boast that your Apple iPad 3 is faster than your friend’s Samsung Galaxy Note? It’s not easy but one of the few good choices is the 69p Geekbench 2 available on the Google Play Store and Apple iTunes App Store.

As the name might suggest it’s somewhat more complex to understand, but can provide a simple number for you to argue about down the pub. Being available on both Android and Apple iOS it does help fuel the argumentative fires.

It’s more of a limited test, only really pushing the processor and memory aspects.

SunSpider

SunSpiderFinally, another cross-platform benchmark that runs on Apple, Android and anything that has a web browser is SunSpider.

This tests something called JavaScript, which is a core aspect of website and browser performance. It runs a suite of browser-based tests multiple times and will generate a time in milliseconds, the lower this is the faster the browser and processor are.

This test is an interesting one because it tests both the speed of the web browser and indirectly the processor. It enables you to test different web browsers on a device and see which is the fastest for web browsing. Or if you use the same browser on different devices enables you to compare processor speeds.

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