One of the first things bloggers do when they attend an event where a new smartphone is announced is compare said smartphone’s performance against others, more established names in the smartphone industry. Our friends over at SlashGear did exactly this at yesterday’s Nokia World, where Nokia announced its first Windows Phone 7-based smartphone called the Lumia 800, comparing its browser performance against the iPhone 4S and the Samsung Galaxy S II.
SlashGear separately compares the browser performance of the Lumia 800 against the iPhone 4S and the Galaxy S II. The performance tests aren’t exactly scientific as they did not take place in a controlled environment. The two tests are, then, anecdotal and we suggest you do not jump to a conclusion based on them.
Unsurprisingly, thanks to its tight hardware and software optimization, the iPhone 4S was found to be the fastest in the browser comparison. Mobile Safari appears to be making full use of the dual-core Apple A5 chip which, by the way, has been proved to be the fastest in its class.
Apple apparently uses a couple of clever tricks such as filling URL bar before loading the page to make the user think that the browser is rendering faster. The spinning circle in the iOS status bar is what you should actually look at to ascertain if the web page has loaded or not. Still, despite all the apparent trickery, the iPhone 4S did load pages the quickest!
The Galaxy S II, which is powered by a dual-core 1.2GHz chip, came in at a respectable 2nd place in the test. The biggest advantage it has over the Lumia 800 and iPhone 4S is that it comes with support for Flash so you can, as Adobe would say, browse the “full web” with it.
Despite having one less core and half the RAM, the Nokia Lumia 800 held up surprisingly well against giants like the iPhone 4S and Galaxy S II in the comparison tests. It was certainly the slowest of the bunch, but only by a second or two.
SlashGear found that all page navigation was “smooth across the board” once the page loaded up. As we mentioned before, browser speed doesn’t just depend on rendering, but also on network speed/load, so please do not consider this to be a conclusive test.
The Nokia Lumia 800 was announced yesterday at Nokia World. To learn more about it, check out our post on its features, specifications and availability.
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