Originally Posted by Kangal

"The device isn't innovative to me".

The iPhone 5 bought in a SoC that only matched the competition. It increased the screen size slightly, but also increased the phone. It reinvented nothing, except bring pre-existing innovation from its competitors (ie LTE). That wasn't considered a evolutionary upgrade but a revolutionary one.

The S4 brings in a SoC that decimates the competitors, and what the competitors would hope to bring out in 6 months times. It increased the screen size slightly, while actually making the phone smaller. It reinvented new interactions (Look to Pause, Dual camera, etc etc) and bought in a few pre-exsisting innovations from its competitors (ie Glove Touch, Floating Touch). And people say this is considered as a evolutionary update to the SIII?

--Bias much?

"iOS is smoother than Android"
This is actually a myth.
Lag is caused by 3 factors (Touchscreen, Processor, Software). To solve "Lag Issues" one must tackle the problem at its source: the bottleneck.

You must be asking yourself, with Project Butter on Jelly Bean and a highly powerful Quadcore processor, why does the S4 have any lag?

Well, because the bottleneck has not been solved!

Firstly, the processor.
A 1GHz A8/A7 is powerful enough to churn through gestures quite easily (just see the N9). Making it 8x more powerful in the case of the S4 doesn't achieve anything, really. Its like a sports car with only 2 gears, where the highest gear is limited to a certain rpm (or lets say km/h) adding a turbo charger is not going to make the car go faster because the gear will still be limiting it.

Secondly, the software.
Android had solved a lot of "touchscreen" issues from the 2.x era with the release of 2.3.5
Android 3.0-3.2 were actually Gingerbread with a few custimizations, and it was laggy.
Google only managed to un-do some of the "issues" it created with ICS 4.0.3
...At this stage both Android and iOS were equal in-terms of response times.

So why did iOS "feels snappier" ?
Well iOS has more simpler animations that try to mask the lag. And iOS actually gives highest priority to touch animations, which is why touching the screen has immediate effect but it drastically causes everything else to slow down (eg during Web browsing, Android will seem laggy but it will load contents quicker).

So Google decided to tackle the issue head-on and with Project Butter.
It has imitated iOS by trying to mask the lag with faster and more extensive animations and refresh rates. So as far as the software side is concerned, it isn't the bottleneck anymore.

Thirdly, the Touchscreen sensor.
We don't need to assume it, or deduce it... we actually know it.
Even with impressive software and hardware on the iPhone we still have "perceivable lag". Currently the iPhone 4S, is rated at 80-85ms, has the least lag (faster than the iPhone 5/Nexus 4's in-cell touch sensors). Compared to the Galaxies of 95-100ms (as explained before, the software prioritization affects it slightly).

The Touchscreen Sensor is the source or bottleneck of perceivable lag in these high-tech-high-end devices. We're actually using pretty old tech in these things, and they're rated only as fast as 60ms. Making these things more sensitive to touch would hurt the experience than anything else, as it would make gestures erratic and prone to picking up accidental actions. Throwing more power at these things is also not a solution, as the sensors already suck up a lot of power... it just wouldn't be theesable on a mobile device.

What this means is we need actual improvements within the touch sensor itself, and to make it faster without compromising much. I believe when we hit the 40ms mark, things will be very very sharp.

Forthly, how fast is fast?
The human eye detects changes fractions slower than 1ms, but the sending of this data and processing it slows it down drastically. We're talking between 10ms - 20ms. (note humans don't detect visual data by a fixed rate, but by a response time to movement).
To illustrate this; most professional formula 1 racers have a response time of about 110ms, a human blinks at a speed of 150-200ms. I can remember when such response times were “pretty fast” on computers.

MS Research lab illustrates my point much more conveniently by video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

Originally Posted by thedead1440

3rd party games are used for barometers? For the uninitiated, Temple Run came in as an iOS game and the popularity of it amazed the original developers who then hired 2 developers to port it over to Android. Now the Android team is slightly larger though...

Originally Posted by Artyom

even if it's poor coded on android the galaxy s3 has 3 more cores to catch up unlike the iphone 4.

As Temple Run was originally released on a custom, flexible engine on the iOS platform, it had difficulties when ported to the Android, primarily because it utilized Unity game engine. The game frequently crashed on Android,[23][24] leading to generally unfavourable reviews.[8] The game still has issues on Android due to the Unity engine.[citation needed]

Originally Posted by thedead1440

WTF??? You really mean that or are you just trolling now? At this point it feels like you need to brush up on your knowledge quite a bit before making such widely inaccurate statements.

Number of cores can't really compensate for poor coding! I can code a pos and 100 cores won't make it work if my software can't utilize anything properly. Also its a game; a poorer GPU would make a difference too!

Wikipedia has a nice explanation for you:

Originally Posted by Kangal

The iPhone 5 bought in a SoC that only matched the competition. It increased the screen size slightly,

The S4 brings in a SoC that decimates the competitors, and what the competitors would hope to bring out in 6 months times

Originally Posted by Artyom

what did you expect? almost every app and game firstly comes to ios i can't interfere with this. showing core apps would be less objective than showing same games or apps on both platforms and even if it's poor coded on android the galaxy s3 has 3 more cores to catch up unlike the iphone 4.
it doesn't have to be an iphone, i know that you can give clear examples from your n9 and your android devices. if i had a daily usage android device. i could proove it.

Originally Posted by patlak

You're kidding, right? In your own words, the GPU in the A6 decimates any other GPU on any SoC. This year phones have finally managed to keep up with the release of the Adreno 320 and guess what, the SGX544MP3 inside the Exynos 5. As for CPU processing, the A6 has more than enough for native applications unlike Android which requires higher power for that Java crap. And in your opinion, why does the iPhone 5 still destroy any new Droid, such as the Xperia Z, One, etc at web browsing, with that measly, pathetic CPU? Beats LOGIC!

How long has the iPhone 5 / A6 been out for? It would be a sad story if the S4 / Exynos 5 didn't manage to overtake it.