Samsung Galaxy S5 vs Galaxy S4: Do you need to upgrade?

Processors are upgraded with every smartphone refresh. Performance improvements are incremental - with graphical performance and battery life the biggest changes.

Galaxy S4 - In the UK, Samsung equipped the device with a Snapdragon 800 series CPU. It was clocked at 1.9GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM. A 1.6GHz Octa-core processor was also available in selected markets. Galaxy S5 - This uses Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 801 series. The quad-core chip has a clock speed of 2.5GHz and also has 2GB of RAM. In India there is an Exynos Octa-core version, but this does not support 4G.

The S5 has been outscoring the S4 in virtually all benchmarks ranging from the Webxprt browser test to the Geekbench synthetic test. In real-world terms you'll see a difference when playing games or downloading large files such as movies.

Khidr Suleman is the Technical Editor at IT Pro, a role he has fulfilled since March 2012. He is responsible for the reviews section on the site  - so get in touch if you have a product you think might be of interest to the business world. He also covers the hardware and operating systems beats. Prior to joining IT Pro, Khidr worked as a reporter at Incisive Media. He studied law at the University of Reading and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism and Online Writing at PMA Training.