iPad vs iPhone 3GS vs Nexus One; Browser Speed Test

AnandTech recently benchmarked the iPhone 3GS, the iPad, and the Google Nexus One devices to one another and found out that the iPad is usually faster than the Nexus One, but the Nexus One also routinely beats the iPhone 3GS by a significant amount. Other tests show that the iPad is twice as fast the iPhone 3GS. All of these tests that were run were browser tests, which make them a fairly narrow focus, but the company did promise more thorough test results soon. All three devices use a mobile Webkit variant and don’t yet officially support Flash and were on the same WiFi connection. Here is what we gathered from the results:

Between the two devices of the same class (smartphones) the Nexus One and the iPhone 3GS, the fight isn’t even close. The Nexus One leaves the iPhone in the dust when it comes to browsing speed and it also has almost three times the pixels to render (320x480 vs. 480x800.) Clearly, Apple will be releasing a new iPhone in three months with a faster processor, that will probably 1-up the competition, but in the meantime, the Nexus One is the browsing champ.

HTC, the company that builds the Nexus One (and the same company Apple is suing over patents), has a few more phones coming out with the same 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon inside the Nexus One. The HTC HD2 (which runs on Windows Mobile) and more importantly, Sprint’s Evo 4G, which also runs Android and is expected to be released around the same time of the summer as the iPhone.

As for the iPad, we expected it to beat both phones due to its larger size, which would translate to a better battery and faster components and as expected, it did. To compare the iPad to the phones seems a bit unfair since the phones are less than a third of the size. Comparing the iPad to the JooJoo or other Intel based MID’s would have been a little bit more informative and interesting. That being said, there was something still interesting about the speed of the iPad. It was learned yesterday that the ipad uses the same ARM Cortex A8-level processor as the iPhone 3GS (Running at 1GHz vs. iPhone 3GS’s 600 MHz) with the same PowerVR graphics processing. Interestingly enough, Google’s Nexus One has an ARM Cortex A8 class (Scorpion) processor as well. But it doesn’t have nearly the graphics horsepower as the two Apple products. It uses an older ATI chipset vs. Apple’s PowerVR chipsets from Imagination Tech.

Figuring that most of the other things are equal, we can sort of conclude that a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon with ATI graphics performs about as well as a 800 MHz Apple A4 cihp with PowerVR, give or take. That means if Apple wanted to take the browsing speed crown away from Google/HTC, it will have to run a processor that is faster than the ARM Cortex A8 processor at 800 MHz, which doesn’t seem hard, in fact, we’d expect Apple to come out with an iPad-specced iPhone processor. But even if Apple does do that, it won’t last too long as the speed champ. The successor to the Snapdragon, the QSD8x50A is clocked at 1.3 GHz with 30% less power consumption and is due in the second half of 2010. That should line up well with the iPad’s speed, if it doesn’t surpass it that is.

That means Google phones will be going as fast as Apple’s iPad and the next generation of the iPhone by the end of this year. Apple should consider moving to bi-yearly updates of its mobile units to compete.