myTouch 4G Vs Desire HD Benchmarks

T-Mobile's myTouch 4G is currently going through the rigors of testing in the run-up to its full review, but preliminary benchmarking is already suggesting that it's the fastest Android smartphone around.  What's curious, however, is the performance difference between the myTouch 4G and another recent HTC smartphone with identical core hardware, the Desire HD we reviewed earlier this week.  On paper, both handsets have the same latest-gen 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 processor paired with 768MB of RAM; in testing, the myTouch 4G is coming out significantly ahead.

We ran Quadrant on both phones, an Android app that tests overall performance of a smartphone and then assigns it a single score, having gauged not only core processor speed but I/O and 3D graphics abilities.  The HTC Desire HD scored 1,666, putting it well ahead of other Android 2.2 devices like the Nexus One and Motorola DROID X; however the T-Mobile myTouch 4G scored 1,846, almost 200 points more.

Update: myTouch 4G's I/O accounts for 2,666 points which is significantly higher than Nexus One.

Now, as Quadrant suggests, there's more to performance than CPU and RAM – it's also testing GPU and other aspects of the Android hardware – but the difference between two phones running what's believed to be very similar hardware is certainly interesting.  Of course, in the end it's day-to-day performance that makes the lasting impression, and we have no complaints about either device in that respect.  Still, we're looking forward to seeing what the mod community does with both phones: it looks like there's plenty of room for overclocking with the MSM8255.