The worst lies tech companies tell you

Samsung found itself in hot water last week when tech blog AnandTech found that the Galaxy S4 smartphone artificially inflated its top processing speeds.

Samsung designed the Galaxy S4's central processing unit to rev up the chip's power exclusively for certain benchmark testing apps - all for the sake of claiming it was the fastest Android Phone around. Though the phone is theoretically capable of those speeds, Samsung typically restricts its processing power (for good reason too -- otherwise the phone's battery wouldn't last a user through lunch).

The curious thing is that Samsung didn't really need to inflate its benchmarks at all, since it was obvious in actual use that the phone's performance was rivaled only by the HTC One. But it helped to remind us all of an important point: Processor speeds and benchmarks mean little in the real world.

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