On Thursday, Android 4.3 leaked out for the Nexus 4. It took a few hours, and most of Thursday morning, but we finally got a flashable zip working so now many Nexus 4’s have Android 4.3 on board. Now it turns out that someone has done some comparisons on the Nexus 4 with 4.2 versus Android 4.3, and noticed that Android 4.3 has improved the benchmarks of the latest Nexus phone. That’s not really a surprise, I’d be more surprised if the benchmarks got worse with Android 4.3.
It didn’t improve all benchmarks, but on CFBench a Nexus 4 running Android 4.2.2 did better than the same device running Android 4.3. But CFBench – Jave showed Android 4.3 improved results by over 500 points. Android 4.3 also supports OpenGL 3.0, and that has improved the GLBenchmark 2.5 test results by 5 frames onscreen and 6 frames for the off-screen test.
These changes probably won’t make too much of a difference in real-world use. But it’s still nice to see benchmarks getting even higher for the Nexus 4. But I’m sure the benchmarks would improve for other devices running Android 4.3. It’s also important to note that the Dalvik Virtual machine has been optimized in Android 4.3, which brings noticeable performance boosts in most apps. Which is something we always love to see. That should also get rid of some of the lag that we’ve been seeing lately on the Nexus 4 and Nexus 7.
We still expect Android 4.3 to be formally announced next week at Google’s big event in San Francisco, along with a new Nexus 7, and possibly some other goodies. We’ll know for sure next week what Google has up its’ sleeves but in the meantime we’ll be speculating.
How many of our readers flashed Android 4.3 onto their Nexus 4? How are you liking the update so far? I haven’t had the time to flash it onto mine yet. But I will soon. Let us know in the comments below.