"The reason? Reportedly, Google's phone isn't using Neon floating-point optimization, but if it did, the scores you'll see just past the break could be quite different. Hey Mountain View, you getting all this?"
OK, so let’s change the viewport on the Nexus to the same size as the iPhone just so we can compare the two equally. With just two characters on screen, switching the viewport size to 480×320 on the Nexus, give a frame-rate improvement from 30fps to 40fps but with 8 characters on screen there is no difference; with the frame-rate remaining the same at 21fps.
This reveals that the bottleneck to performance must be elsewhere. The next logical test is to see if the bottleneck is CPU related. We can test this by turning off the animation bone & skinning calculations. Doing this reveals that drawing to the full screen on the Nexus with the animation disabled has no effect on the frate-rate yet when only drawing to the same screen area as the iPhone then the frame rate increases from 20fps up-to 25fps.
The conclusion is that the Nexus is primarily GPU fill-rate limited and the lack of access to the Neon float-point instructions means the CPU is only just keeping pace with the fill-rate.