Those numbers are barely better than the SIII and Nexus. I would have expected more, given that Androids much faster than these are coming out any day now.
I'm always surprised how many shipping Apple products are beaten in benchmarks by about-to-be-maybe-shipped-but-don't-yet-exist products from competitors. You think they'd do better than that!
The reason that there is only one iPhone release a year. So it better be much faster than the competition at release so as not to get totally whopped 4 to 6 months down the line. iPhone 4S sales started softening in the 3rd quarter itself instead of the usual 4th quarter before the new iPhone comes out.
iOS devices have never really been on top for CPU benchmarks though have they?
For example the Tegra 2 based non-prime Transformer and A5 based iPad 2 were released about the same time (March 2011) and that Transformer score 35% higher on Geekbench but the A5 GPU benchmarks were way way ahead and have stayed competitive with today's competition [1].
"so as not to get totally whopped 4 to 6 months down the line. iPhone 4S sales started softening in the 3rd quarter itself instead of the usual 4th quarter..."
Does anyone really think that iphone sales lagged more than previously because of CPU benchmarks?
I would guess only indirectly as better performance on Android has helped make the experience better. But there's all kinds of other things improving the Android experience (e.g. better apps, better content experience, ICS and Jellybean hitting more devices).
Even with Android improving relative to iOS over the year I'd say a more reasonable reason for Apple's Q3 lag was the fact that they rolled out globally in 2 quarters instead of, historically, adding more countries and carriers well into Q3 and sometimes Q4 of launch. The iphone 4 also had the midseason CDMA and the much delayed white iphone launches midyear.
You need to remember the iPhone 5 uses a different architecture (armv7s) that Geekbench currently isn't compiled for. It's highly likely there wil be a number of optimisations to be had from moving between armv7 to armv7s, so the benchmark score for the iPhone 5 is highly likely to increase once the binaries are re-made.
Why? Apple's devices have rarely focused on raw performance though their access to the latest and greatest mobile GPUs has been way ahead of the curve in the last couple of years. Using a 4S it's actually a little hard for me to comprehend my device being any faster. Everything is already so fast and smooth. This may be the first generation of iPhone where the performance increases are barely noticeable to users.
