The battery performance showed a leap from a 62 hour endurance rating to an 81 hour one, which was mainly due to a much-improved stand by time. As for the benchmarks, well, there’s a different story here. Note that KitKat brings faster multitasking because of optimized memory usage, which should aid in better benchmarking scores.

The LG G2 offers a very capable Snapdragon 800 rig with a quad-core 2.26 GHz Krait CPU, 2 GB of RAM and the Adreno 330. This is still considered flagship material hardware even with Snapdragon 801 and its faster GPU lurking about.

Let’s see in the tests below. BenchmarkPi and Linpack are both centered around the CPU performance – the first looking for single core and the second for multi-core performance. Both show a lead for the Jelly Bean LG G2 but the difference is more notable in Linpack.

Lower is better

Higher is better

GeekBench 3, AnTuTu 4 and Quadrant test everything about the hardware setup – from CPU to graphics, to read/write performance. The results are are mixed bag – the KitKat G2 prevails in Geekbench 3 but fails to beat the Jelly Bean G2 in either AnTuTu 4 and Quadrant.The difference in Geekbench 3 and Quadrant is dismissible but AnTuTu 4 shows a score difference of 5516 points in favor of the Jelly Bean G2.

Higher is better

Higher is better

Higher is better

Moving along into GPU territory it shows almost identical scores for both software versions of the device that could have easily gone either way. The KitKat G2 takes the 1080p offscreen T-Rex test (by 0.2 fps) and loses in the 1080p offscreen Manhattan test (by just 0.1 fps). The only big difference is at the on-screen and Epic Citadel, where on KitKat the G2 managed 6.3 fps more, suggesting that LG might have found a way to squeeze some more power of of the GPU.

Higher is better

Higher is better

Higher is better

Now that we’re getting to the final part of our benchmarking comparison – JavaScript and HTML 5 performance. Here KitKat should make a bigger impact – each new Android version boasts better browsing and faster web performance.

And indeed the KitKat-kitted LG G2 manages a much better score in the JavaScript-centric SunSpider and still outdoes the Jelly Bean G2 in HTML 5-focused BrowserMark 2.

Lower is better

Higher is better

So it appears LG has done some software trickery on the Jelly Bean build of the LG G2 but didn’t bother as much on the KitKat build. That’s just a theory though – we’re not calling LG a cheater just yet. The significant differences in Linpack and AnTuTu 4 in favor of the Jelly Bean version do seem suspicious, but even if cheating was the case it’s good that LG has given up on it now.

As always we urge you to look not only at benchmarks but into the real-life performance of a device. Scores are meaningful at times but looking at the G2 with KitKat and Jelly Bean will reveal that nothing has changed dramatically. That’s not to say KitKat isn’t an improvement on speed – just that the LG G2 was a perfectly capable smartphone to begin with.