And the fastest smartphone YOU can buy right now is …

SMARTPHONES from Apple, Samsung, Huawei, OnePlus and more have been pitted against one another. And the winner might surprise you.

 

The revered AnTuTu test has pitted Android smartphone against the iPhone for the first time

 

Apple’s hugely popular iPhone 6S has obliterated the competition in the latest round of gruelling speed tests.

Benchmark and performance enthusiasts look forward to the annual Top 10 Best Performance Smartphones test by AnTuTu.

But this was the first year Android and Apple smartphones were pitted against one another, thanks to the release of AnTuTu 6.0 earlier this year, which was made available as a cross-platform app.

Unfortunately for Android fans – the arrival of the iPhone does not bring good news.

With a score of 132,620, the latest Apple handset beat nearest Android rival Huawei's Mate 8 by over 40 per cent.

The Huawei Mate 8 ranks in second place with 92,746.

 

The top 10 fastest smartphones on the market at the moment, according to the latest AnTuTu test

 

Coming in third place was the Meizu Pro 5 and Samsung's award-winning Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge Plus follow in fourth and fifth place.

That means the iPhone 6S is about 60 per cent faster than both the Samsung flagship smartphones.

Apple’s iPhone 6 makes an appearance in sixth place, just before the stellar OnePlus 2 – which sells for close to half the price of every other smartphone in the competition.

The iPhone 6S is powered by the Cupertino firm’s own A9 chip, which is around 90 per cent faster than the original iPhone.

 

The Apple A9 chip is much faster than the US technology firm’s previous efforts

 

One of the main differences between the A9 chip and the SnapDragon processors that power the majority of the Android handsets in this list, is that Apple’s chip only needs to work on iOS with a very limited number of hardware variations.

This means it can be tailored and tweaked to get the best possible performance from Apple’s mobile operating system.

However Qualcomm has to cater to multiple operating systems – including Android and Windows Phone – as well as the multitude of hardware variations each manufacturer brings to the market.

And while the majority of Android manufacturers have packed their flagship smartphones with octa-core processors and as much as 4GB of RAM, the iPhone 6S relies on a dual-core 64-bit processor and 2GB of RAM.

AnTuTu tests only one device per model and collects some 500 data samples for each smartphone.

The company did not include the Apple 6S Plus or the iPhone 6 Plus in the ranking because there were significant differences when compared to the smaller 4.7inch iPhone 6S and iPhone 6.

Samsung is expected to update its Galaxy range next month at Mobile World Congress technology show, in Barcelona.

The Samsung Galaxy S7 is likely to be much faster than the previous generation.

Other rumours include a pressure sensitive display and the return of the microSD card slot.