On paper, the Galaxy S5 and the new HTC One (M8) sport relatively the same specs. The S5 does sport a slightly faster Snapdragon 801 chipset — 2.5GHz vs. 2.3GHz on the One — but that difference is barely noticeable in real life.

Well, as it turns out, Samsung did not really pay much attention to optimising its TouchWiz skin for the hardware on the Galaxy S5 and the device is actually slower than the One (M8) in certain day-to-day tasks. 

As evident from the video below, there is a noticeable delay on the Galaxy S5 while switching between apps or even while opening the Recents app list. On the other hand, the HTC One (M8) even with its slightly slower processor performs admirably with near instant switching between apps and opening of Recents apps, and achieves a smoothness level that rivals the iPhone. The latter is also able to keep the apps in its memory for a longer period of time than the S5, which prevents tabs and apps from reloading when the user switches back to them.

App opening times on both the devices were nearly the same so the delay in switching between apps and the opening on Recents Apps can be blamed on the poor software optimisation from Samsung.

HTC’s Sense UI might not pack as many features as TouchWiz but it definitely delivers where things matters the most — UI performance. It is completely unacceptable for a $700 flagship phone from Samsung to even show slight hints of lag, especially when KitKat has a lower resource usage footprint than its predecessors.