I'm not picking on you, so please don't take this personally. You just happened to make this statement which I think illustrates our utterly irrational thinking when it comes to spec.
Have we learned nothing? You're planning to buy the Samsung Galaxy S on the strength of the faster processor? By all accounts the iPhone 4 is an utterly fantastic device, responds instantly to any action, feels great in the hand and provides real value to the user. This is forgotten or disregarded because of an abstract number attached to a chip.
I can understand if this was an issue of balance. Maybe this was just that last item that tipped you towards Samsung but I see this sort of thinking all the time. It was the same with the iPad RAM issue. Suddenly the stuff you get, the way it works and the real value to the user is lost to view behind a list of numbers and letters. No wonder Apple doesn't talk about specifications.
This, this, a thousand times this.
Seriously folks, I know it's in our collective geek DNA to reach for raw numbers as a measure of the worth of a device but it's time to start getting away from that. Performance in desktops (and laptops actually) has been largely irrelevant for some time now, mobile devices are starting to go the same way and that goes doubly so for comparing different operating systems.
The ONLY thing that matters is how fast the device feels to actually use. That's it, end of story. If HP, for instance, manage to come up with a version of webOS that runs lightning quick on a 600Mhz processor then the fact that it IS a 600Mhz processor is utterly irrelevant to the end user experience. In fact, in a lot of ways, the slower the better as slower usually draws less power (assuming all other aspects of design are equal). Raw benchmark figures are, more or less, irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
It's the same with those getting up in arms about the iPad 'only' having 256MB while the iPhone 4 has 512MB. It doesn't affect the iPad in the slightest, it's still a lightning quick device with more than enough grunt to multitask once iOS4 drops in the autumn so what's the problem? The spec is irrelevant, the only thing that matters in the current wave of... let's say.... 'post PC devices' is the end user experience. If that's not right, if it lags or glitches and better hardware would have solved the problem, THEN you have a good cause for complaint.
