The inclusion of the A13 Bionic processor in the new iPhone SE has caused Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, to boast: “It’s an unbelievable offer. It’s, if you will, the engine of our top phones in a very affordable package. And it’s faster than the fastest Android phones. And so it’s an exceptional value.”
“It’s faster than the fastest Android phones,” is quite a statement, but is it true?
Our verdict: Apple iPhone SE (2020) review: Old is new, again!
The iPhone SE is full of contradictions. It is an iPhone, yet it is priced like a mid-range Android device. It is new, yet it looks like the iPhones from two or three years ago. It has mostly lesser specs (only one camera, just a 4.7-inch display, and less than Full HD screen resolution), but yet it has Apple’s latest processor, the A13 Bionic — and it’s this last feature that makes the new iPhone SE quite remarkable.
At the other end of the scale, you have a device like the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra — the current performance king in the Android world. Here you won’t find any contradictions. It has the best of everything that Samsung could squeeze into it. A 120Hz, HDR10, QHD display, at least 12GB of RAM, a minimum of 128GB of internal storage, a plethora of camera lenses and sensors, 8K video recording, the top Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, support for 5G, and so much more.
No compromises, no contradictions, and, according to Apple’s CEO, no chance of beating a $399 iPhone.
Is the iPhone SE really faster than the fastest Android phone?
But I am not taking Tim Cook’s word for it. I want to see some numbers. The video at the top of this article is a Speed Test G run between the iPhone SE (2020) and the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra to see whether the most over-spec’d Android phone you can currently buy does indeed come up short against the cut-price phone from Cupertino. Budget vs ultra-premium. Galaxy vs iPhone. Who wins?
There’s no way to sugarcoat this: the results are quite damning.
The $399 iPhone SE clearly beats the $1,399 Galaxy S20 Ultra overall. But, it isn’t all bad. Looking at the CPU time, which involves tasks that rely heavily on the CPU (single-threaded and multi-threaded), the S20 Ultra actually won; 38.