I don't get it, so I need someone to explain something to me. How can the iPhone consistently blow everything else away in performance AND battery life, despite having a smaller battery and seemingly lesser processor. I understand that Apple had a time advantage by getting into the touchscreen smartphone game first but how has nobody caught up yet? I am a huge Nexus fanboy but it seems that the IPhone is objectively faster and more efficient, even with googles full efforts to keep up.
You'll notice they are very strict about background processing in applications and the usage of battery draining things such as GPS or cellular data. This helps battery life significantly. Google didn't start prioritizing view smoothness and efficiency until android 3 or 4.
The OS & apps are pretty much pure C from the ground up, with an objective-c application layer. The entire view system (Core Animation) is GPU accelerated with OpenGL from day one.
Objective-C on iOS does not have a GC, so apps are generally faster and more responsive with manual memory management. Many apps can drop into pure C or C++ to improve performance easily.
All of these performance choices give you a faster phone for less processor.
A slower processor also tends to use less energy too. Battery size is a pure weight/size vs capacity tradeoff.
It's also worth noting that Apple have been refining their power management code/chips for many, many years, so it's likely better than anything Google have come up with in the last couple of years.
