Palm Pre Webcast Tidbit: Browser Nearly 4x Faster than iPhone (Updated with video)
I’m slightly bummed by the webcast presented by Palm and Sprint. There wasn’t much earth-shattering news here; it was a walkthough of the UI, a discussion about Synergy and info on the Sprint services that the Palm Pre will support. No updated news on pricing or availability at this point. There was one interesting tidbit in the demo when Matt Crowley, product line manager at Palm, did a Universal Search demo.
It was nice to see the Bluetooth app appear when he typed the letter “B.” Adding an “I” showed two of his contacts that had a “BI” in their name. Matt went the full monty by searching Google for Big12. That’s when it got interesting. He went to www.big12sports.com to check out the conference basketball site. It’s a pretty intensive site (shown) that’s best suited for a powerful desktop browser. I’m assuming that he was using Wi-Fi. I searched for and then hit the same site over Wi-Fi on my iPhone, and here’s where it got very interesting.
The Pre had fully rendered the complex site in around 8 seconds. Same site on my iPhone? About 30 seconds. Obviously, I don’t know if the Palm Pre Webkit browser caches web pages from prior usage. I know my iPhone doesn’t, so even if this page load speed was based on cache, it’s still a function not offered on my iPhone. Again, I saw this in real-time. Hit the Big12 site on your device and see how long it takes to render and use. Heck, why not leave a comment with the platform you used as well as the browser?
We already knew that Palm went with a high-end TI OMAP3 processor, while Apple opted for a different ARM solution from Samsung. I’m not losing sight of the fact that my iPhone hardware is nearly 2 years old, but the performance that I saw when browsing on the Pre was staggering. Bear in mind: nobody from Palm nor from Sprint mentioned any performance numbers. They didn’t make any comparisons to other devices. This is simply what I observed from the webcast, timing the performance and sharing the observation.
Update: Here’s the sequence I described above so you can see what I saw.
iPhone 3G- ~30 seconds via WiFi
T-Mobile G1- ~14 seconds via WiFI
BlackBerry Storm- ~18 seconds via 3G (doesn’t have WiFi)
I should also point out that the Storm browser had a little bit of trouble displaying the complex page. It was all there but not quite lined up as well as the other two.
I was so underwhelmed by the broswer on my Instinct…this no doubt will be be a huge leap of improvement.
I’m pretty sure it was cached. But as you said, at least caching is an improvement over the iPhone. I too found the G1’s browser very zippy btw.
loaded everything except the changing flash picture & ad box @ 15 seconds, picture came in at about 30 seconds reloaded whole page @ 40 seconds. showed status bar as complete at 1 min 15 seconds.
HTC Touch HD running Dutty v 2.2 beta on Opera Mobile.
forgot to mention this was on Wifi.
Palm Centro on VZW with 2 bars – 03:34 and it couldnt load the whole page!
So what were the three big differentiators that only the Pre on Sprint offers?
Very. Good. Question.
There, that’s three.
Sprint 3G, Simple Everthing and Ready Now.
I guess I am glad I wasn’t considered worthy to attend then
That did load super fast! Even if it was caching it before.
Ok, I just got 28 sec. with my old Treo 750 with Opera mini on HSDPA with 3 (H3G) operator. I guess networks are a little bit faster in old Eu…
Indeed, Europ is ver well equiped. This device is going to chllenge the iphone bjut who knows whether the iphone V3 comes over on june? Message from the very old Europ, lol
Kevin,
One question I’ve had is whether the Pre will sync notes, to dos, etc. with a local install of Outlook, or will it require something like an Exchange server to do that? The demos I’ve seen so far focus on the web OS, not the organizer features us long term Palm users are wondering whether are still in the new device. Did you see anything today that might answer that question?
Kevin, the Pre isn’t really geared to sync with anything locally that I know of yet. It’s generally designed to sync OTA, so Outlook is likely out from a native perspective. Exchange is a possibility of course, but when asked about sync today, I heard Palm say POP and IMAP. I still have the webcast, so I’ll double check that.
From all the demos and presentations, Palm has held to the Pre having essentially no desktop sync functionality. I strongly doubt it will work with ActiveSync, which it would have to do to sync with Outlook.
There will be Exchange support. There will be POP and IMAP. There will be 3rd-party apps that will do web-based note syncing, like Evernote. Plan on using one of those, or just keeping note in-browser.
55 seconds on Verizon HTC Touch Pro over EVDO
Pre was not on evdo though.
tmobile g1 ~30sec via 3g
I’m at work so no access to wifi. I’ll try using wifi when i get home.
using 3g or evdo probably isn’t a good test since if the cell tower is overloaded you are going to get slower speeds. With wifi u can control the bandwidth a lot easier to measure the page loading speed.
Not to be down on the Pre, it looks nice, and it will have some traction for a while but do you think they picked sites randomly or ones that Pre specifically well outperformed on?
Do you really think this wasn’t scripted and run through!
using a sprint touch pro on evdo i loaded the site using opera mobile (touch pro 2 build) 27 seconds then loaded it on the new 6 on 6 broswer 37 seconds. both flash enabled im using a custom rom and radio
14 seconds on Opera Mini on an XDA Zest, 22 seconds on Netfront 3.5 on the same hardware.
Until I see the Pre tested in the wild by a truly independent user I’m not getting excited, but it looks like a game-changer doesn’t it?
I have a Sprint Mogul running SkyFire browser over Sprint EVDO RevA and had the everything in 15 seconds including flash. Maybe Skyfire shrunk it down? I would hope the Pre wasn’t on wifi. The Sprint network can handle it.
As much as I want to like Skyfire, it really can’t compete against a natively rendered browser, at least in terms of a consistently smooth browsing experience. Sure, it’ll probably load any site within 15 seconds (it’s just streaming the image representation of it, after all), but trying to scroll and zoom with it is an absolute chore, IMO. They’ve even dumbed down the interface recently so you can’t even arbitrarily zoom with the selector box. How lame is that? At least other mobile browsers like Iris got zoom right with their navigation map. And Android’s browser (WebKit-based) on my modded AT&T Tilt blows any WinMo browser out of the water, hands down.
it loaded for me in 7 or 8 seconds using skyfire on a sch i760 over 3g. skyfire is my fave hands down.
i’m not sure what paco meant about difficulty scrolling, mine scrolls fine. it does take a sec to clean up the page when scrolling, but this is the case in all webkit browsers i have seen with the exception of the pre’s. safari, android, fennec, skyfire, etc., they all give that checkerboard background while the page renders when scrolling. regarding the zoom, i use the shortcut hitting 3 to scroll incrementally if needed, but the smart zoom works great.
paco, check out the latest skyfire release. text is resized for easier reading, the smart zoom works better, the home page has nice rss feeds, and you get full flash. it really is a pleasure to use.
Sprint Mogul, 10 seconds over EVDO (I think). Had it connected through Activesync and using My Mobiler to control it.
10 seconds with Nokia 5800 from cache
Palm T|X running opera mini 4.2, wifi = 16 seconds but as others say not all loaded.
First time going to that site from my HTC Diamond. took 24 seconds
as much as i love my iphone, the look, ui, features set of that phone are awesome. apple should be shit scared of the palm pre and what they have coming on march 17th better be mind blowing or i might swap over to the palm.
the only thing that worries me is it only has 8GB non expandable memory. i need more god damnit
Ah yes, my next phone awaits.
48 seconds here, on my iPhone on Wifi (16Mbits in the UK).
HTC TyTN II over ATT 3G – 10 seconds on Opera Mini from Google Link to full page load.
iPhone 3G: 58 secs on Wifi. Damn – that’s awful long.
E71 on wifi in UK with flash on. I got bored after 2minutes and gave up…
The same on 3G.
I cant wait to dump my iphone, the battery is starting to go and I am very tired of paying ATT $160 per month for unlimited when I can go to Sprint for $99 all in. My brother just got the Palm Pro with window 6.1 and it is pretty slick but the Pre looks to finally be in the Iphone class. I am starting to hear some good things about Sprint again, its about time, we need more than just ATT and Verizon who overcharge and underdeliver on their “network” claims.
Lets not forget about T-mobile with there new 49.99 unlimited voice and 39.99 to add a line
N78 text appeared in about 15sec pictures and banners about 4 minutes later (no exaggeration) WiFi (N78 native browser)
I got 44 seconds from hitting enter to fully loaded on my G1 using 3G. I’m too lazy to use wifi.
grrr u cant compare skyfire or opera mini to these browsers because they are server based browsers!!!! meaning it loads the page on skyfire or opera servers first than emulates it to your phones!! omg what noobs you guys are!
treo 755p
20 seconds over sprint 3g using opera mini
same phone with Blazer browser… 3 minutes 50 seconds before erroring out that the page was too large to be displayed
HTC Touch
60 seconds over sprint 3g with internet explorer
My at&t Bold loaded the page with no problems at all in 13 seconds, 3G with 4 bars!
Any page opened in Opera Mini or Skyfire is going to be faster. It’s rendered server side. You guys are comparing apples and oranges.
Browser – Skyfire
Phone – HTC Sprint Touch
Load time – About 8-9 sec.
I fully recommend SkyFire. It is a full web browser for mobile phones and it is really fast. Don’t know about cache, but who needs it if you can load this site in 8-9 sec?
thanks, Skyfire is really good, just tried on my Sprint Mogul.
site loads about 8-10 sec too. just gave new life to my 2 year old phone.
Strange that a phone like palm pre can render that site faster than my MacBook Pro with Safari 4, can render it….
Maybe it cache it, and iPhone should also do this, but still…..
3 seconds on my MacBook in Safari 4.
37 Seconds on my G1 via 3G connection
Well over 2 minutes on Sony Ericsson G900 with WiFi and Opera Mobile beta for UIQ
Tried it with my Nokia 5800 over wifi (384kpbs connection). It loads over 1 minutes with Nokia standard browser.
Yes, I find it interesting as well that the Pre, and some of these other phones, can render the page faster than my C2D 2.5ghz laptop. Hmmm…
My C2D 2.4GHz laptop + Firefox did it in 5 sec at first visit.
In the video, the guy isn’t going to big12sports.com, its going directly to the mens basketball link from the google search. On a google g1 with wifi, it took me 15 sec to render that site. Which is the same as what jkontherun reported.
Took 9 seconds to fully load on my Sprint Mogul over EVDO using Opera Mini 4.2. Opera Mini and Skyfire both use a similar approach to browsing. They have servers that do all the “heavy lifting” and then send the final image to your phone. But, in my opinion Opera Mini is the easier to use of the two. I only use Skyfire when I need to stream Flash video or audio. Opera Mini is my day-to-day pick for fast browsing. So, the Pre looks awesome, but it’s browsing speed won’t be the reason for my purchase.
15 Seconds on my HTC wizard with skyfire over wifi. On the second time it’s around 10 seconds.
BlackJack II w/ WinMo 6.1
1m 24s. Page didn’t look nearly as nice as the Pre’s though. I already have money set aside for the Pre
About a second or two on my MacBook Pro 2.33 with Safari 4 over an Airport connection hooked up to TimeWarner broadband cable.
Clocked in just about a minute using the Obigo browser on my Instinct. Problem is while the picture changes on the main pic on the website it makes the loading time inaccurate and scrolling very choppy…
Opera Mini clocked in at 10 seconds, but the pics don’t change…and there’s whited out areas on the screen…
this test is a fake… the palm pre uses the cache…
@ Lupin
How do you know that the page was cached previous to the demonstration? You must be a very flustered iPhone user who can’t believe something else might actually be better!
Why does the test have to be a fake just because the Pre did it in 8 seconds, when Opera Mini on my Instinct just did it in 10 seconds?!! The Sprint network has the fastest 3G download times in America, without question! Run mobilespeedtest.com on an iPhone 3G then on a Sprint phone, the test is not even close! That, combined with the fastest mobile processor I’ve ever heard of, makes me believe that the page was actually NOT cached previous to the demonstration.
Wow that’s fast
I’m really amazed it’s that fast. I thought it was going to be 2x faster, so 4x faster is awesome!