What do you get when the open source community looks at Android 4? Up to twice the speed!
First watch the impressive video to see that the same benchmark finishes in half the time in an optimized Android 4.04 versus stock Google code. Both running on identical hardware.  Enthusiast +Bernhard Rosenkränzer will explain what you´re seeing which is nothing short of amazing.. 

The speed of these demos is an improvement of 100% (60 fps versus 30fps) versus Googles stock Android 4.04, but the engineers warn that this will not be always be achievable. In other tests the the gain may be lower, but there will be other cases where this same improvement or even more is achievable. 

What you see if what you get if you put bright engineers together and ask them to improve existing code. This demo is running on a small Panda development board, but some of these optimizations already made it to custom Roms for popular phones and Google is looking at it as well for its next Jelly Bean release. 

+Bernhard Rosenkränzer and colleagues have gone through all the Android software and optimized every line of code. As Bernhard fondly says ´Google is focused on implementing new stuff, while we are trying to write good code´. They fixed a lot of sloppy programming after which they could compile Android 4.04 with stricter optimization settings. 

The Linaro open source development group is operating since 2010 and  founded by ARM, Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas instruments. It´s goal: optimize software for all ARM based processors, the processor design you will find in most mobile phones, tablets, etc. 
The ARM design is used by manufacturers like Samsung, Apple, and numerous other designers. The focus is not only on improving Android, but also on other *nix variants.  

*If you didn´t understand the text, just realize that instead of buying a new gen phone you could just run this optimized Android and see the same gain as people with the latest and fastest phone available* 

_more info:_ http://www.linaro.org/