iPhone 4S Preliminary Benchmarks, beats all smart phones
anandtech.com"beats all smart phones" seems a bit of an editorial, it looks like it's got a better GPU and a newer Javascript engine (they only show the Apple benchmark rather than Mozilla or Google's and on the desktop Apple does about a fifth better on it's own benchmark than Google's V8, but loses to it on the other two.).
They don't show the raw CPU performance against anything non-Apple, but I'd guess they'd perform roughly the same as any other dual-core A9 at the same clockspeed (with the caveat that Tegra2's don't have NEON), though most Android phones have higher clockspeeds. Since 1GHz Tegra2s from tablets beat it even on Sunspider it seems they still have a raw CPU disadvantage due to clock speeds.
A "bit of an editorial" would be you playing down the fact that in 4 comparisons of smartphones, the 4S is first by a mile in all 4 or claiming that a Sunspider score of 2220 is somehow meaningfully better then 2222.
Everyone and their mother knew the SGX543MP2 was gonna smoke everything else on the market right now. Maybe the new Nexus will leapfrog that but as of this week "beats all smartphones" in benchmarks would seem accurate.
The 4 comparisons of smartphones are in reality 2 GPU benchmarks, and 2 browser benchmarks, one of which is just sunspider, and the other seems heavily weighted towards sunspider since the devices come in roughly the same order. And yes, I knew before I saw this benchmark that the GPU was going to be better than the competition. So as I said, better GPU and newer Javascript seems to cover it (particularly when you note the jump of older iDevices due to OS upgrades i.e. newer Javascript).
As I said, there's no straight CPU benchmark, or anything that is limited by RAM so ""beats all smartphones" in benchmarks" is a fair bit less accurate and complete than what I said.
There's also the fact that Hacker News generally frowns upon editorialized headlines. What was so wrong with the original title of "iPhone 4S Preliminary Benchmarks: ~800MHz A5, Slightly Slower GPU than iPad 2, Still Very Fast" that it needed changed?
(edit: getting very pernickity now but since you misunderstood my comment about comparing the sunspider benchmarks: Android's javascript loses on the sunspider benchmark to iOS's if run on the same device. So if a 1GHz Android device (without NEON) matches a 800MHz iOS device then it's quite likely that a 1.2GHz phone chip will beat it by a fair margin in Sunspider with the Honeycomb or ICS V8, by more again on other Javascript benchmarks which it generally does better on, and more yet again on anything that just benchmarks raw CPU power. I keep reading about Apple's magical A4 and A5, so I'm being pedantic on this point, but the gain is that they chose to use a better GPU from PowerVR and updated their javascript VM, not pixie dust or other Apple magic used in their hardware).
Noticed the Javascript benchmarks, iOS5 is heap faster than iOS4.