Have you ever wondered what makes a smartphone fast and why some smartphones perform better than others? To answer these questions, several key factors have to be taken into account. Firstly, there’s the hardware; the capabilities of a phone’s CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage have a crucial impact on its overall performance.

So does the software in charge of all that silicon, including the operating system and the apps running on it. If you want a phone to be fast, its hardware and software have to work in perfect unison. With this comparison, our goal is to find out which smartphone gets closer to this state of perfection – the HTC One M9 or the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.

On paper, the former seems to have the advantage over Samsung’s handset. Under the hood of the One M9 tick newer and seemingly better hardware components, including a Snapdragon 810 SoC and 3GB of DDR4 RAM. The Note 4, in case you need a refresher, relies on last year’s Snapdragon 805 and 3GB of DDR3 RAM. On top of that, the Note 4’s GPU has to push 1.7 times more pixels around due to the phablet’s higher screen resolution.

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