LG G Flex 2 Is The World's Fastest Phone, Annihilates Samsung's Note 4 and Apple's iPhone 6

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On Wednesday I picked up my review sample of the LG G Flex 2. This is the second time I’ve used the phone, the first was at a pre-brief meeting in Las Vegas for CES. My initial reaction to the phone was “wow”. The reason for that was because I had used the original G Flex, and really liked it, despite it being somewhat impractical in size. But the new phone, it’s much improved, and it has far wider consumer appeal too.
But I’m not here today to fully review the phone, I need to spend longer with it first. What I have done is spend a little time with benchmarking app to see just how fast this phone is. I am, it has to be said, rather against benchmarks because I think they don’t express any real-world facts. But the G Flex 2 is the first phone with the controversial Snapdragon 810 system-on-a-chip, and I wanted to have a look into the overheating issue, and see how well it performs.
From what I’ve seen, the LG G Flex 2 is blazing fast and beats every other phone on the market  according to the benchmarking tools I used. In every test (with one minor 64bit hiccup) the phone beats both the Note 4 and Galaxy S5 as well as, with 3DMark, the iPhone 6.

LG G Flex 2, officially the fastest phone on the market. For no.w. Image credit: Ian Morris

The model LG UK has given me is the SK Telecom model. It has a slightly different model number (LG F510S), but the specs compare to what we will see in the final US and European phones. There may be some differences in 4G frequency support, but that’s irrelevant here.
The specification of the G Flex 2 is somewhat interesting in itself. Although it has the fastest Snapdragon chipset, LG has opted to go with only 2GB of RAM (3GB is more usual on high-end Android devices) and a modest 16GB of storage onboard (there’s a microSD slot that can take 2TB cards, in theory). If nothing else, this will have an impact on how the phone runs day-to-day under normal use.

3DMark score 23714 (iPhone 6 Plus gets 17857, iPad Air 2 gets 21647)

LG has avoided a very high resolution screen though, and this will help the phone to some extent, as driving a 1080×1920 resolution panel is less work that, say, driving the 1440×2560. That said, the 3DMark benchmark runs at 720×1280 to avoid this being an issue.


I ran a bunch of tests from the three biggest names in benchmarking. Some were 32bit, some were 64bit. The G Flex 2 comes with Android 5.0.1, which allows the 64bit processor to run natively coded 64bit apps.
According to 3DMark, the LG G Flex 2 is faster than every other phone in the “Ice Storm Unlimited” benchmark. It was beaten only by the Xiaomi Mi Pad, HTC Nexus 9 and the nVidia Shield, all of which run the Tegra K1, which is obviously designed to do very well indeed in 3D gaming.

Left: 32bit AnTuTu, Middle: 64bit AnTuTu first test, Right: 64bit AnTuTu second test

The only benchmark the G Flex 2 didn’t beat everything in was the first attempt at the 64bit AnTuTu. I don’t know why this might be. It could be RAM speed or size, it could be something to do with this version of Android. On the second try, it beat everything else all over again, with an impressively high score.
There has also been a lot of fuss made about Qualcomm's QCOM +0.75% Snapdragon 810 chipset. There have been persistent rumours that the 810 runs hot, to the point over overheating. I have run several benchmarks, then repeated them. At no point did the phone come close to being as hot as my Note 4 does when it’s being used in the Gear VR. AnTuTu did ask me to wait a short while before retesting on one occasion, claiming the phone was hot. It didn’t actually feel too bad to me, but it’s possible the app is over-cautious.
Here are the results as reported by the benchmarking software (links are to screenshots):
AnTuTu Benchmark v5.6.1 - 48568 (64bit)
AnTuTu Benchmark v5.6.1 - 54337 (64bit, second attempt)
AnTuTu Benchmark v5.6.1 – 50619 (32bit)
Geekbench 3 – 1164 (single-core)
Geekbench 3 – 3796 (multi-core)
3DMark – Maxed out (Ice Storm Extreme)
3DMark - 23714 (Ice Storm Unlimited)
In mobile things move quickly. There will be a lot of phones arriving next month at MWC that will beat the LG G Flex 2 in benchmarks. For one thing, there’s that 64bit issue in AnTuTu that I’m curious about. For another, the on-board 2GB of RAM might hamper speed somewhat.
It will be fascinating to see what the Samsung Galaxy S6 ends up getting in these tests, and which SoC the firm goes with. We’ll know more after MWC which starts in a little over a week’s time.
And one more time: benchmarks are a tiny part of the overall story of a mobile phone. This story is here because this phone is running a chipset that has been controversial. I am starting to wonder just how much of that controversy was actually based on facts. Your thoughts via the comments below, or Twitter TWTR +0.84%, are, as always, most welcome.