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How the First 6 would perform was the biggest question I had in mind before receiving my sample. This is because the included processor is a 1GHz, MediaTek MT6572M CPU, while there is a paltry 512MB of RAM alongside it. Neither are particularly inspiring components, but nonetheless, I had to the give the First 6 a chance.
To start with real-world, everyday performance, one word that immediately springs to mind is ‘temperamental.' This is because, at times, the First 6 would zip around between a few open apps and the home pages with no problems at all. However, at other times, it would take a metaphorical age to open some apps or to compose a text message.
My theory is that most of the performance problems come from the limited amount of RAM. Have more than a few apps (5 or more, realistically) open in the background and suddenly all your RAM is being used. From here, performance seizes up as the system struggles to free up the necessary memory for new tasks. When I started closing every app manually after I had finished with it, performance stabilised. So as long as you remember to close apps running in the background, performance is fairly reasonable.
On to the benchmarks, then. In Geekbench 3, the First 6 scored 253 for single-core performance, and 462 for multi-core performance. This is pretty poor, and well behind the respective 460 and 1108 of the Smart prime 6.
Unfortunately, Ice Storm Unlimited refused to run without crashing on the first 6, so I cannot include a score. I can only conclude the First 6 could simply not handle the stress test at all.
Finally, above you can see the peak download and upload speeds I managed using a Vodafone, 3G connection. 4G is not supported so top speeds are out of reach for the First 6.
