Pre Browser Almost 4x Faster than iPhone?

So, remember last Friday when Dieter posted up the Roger McNamee "smack talk" post?  McNamee had done an interview with Bloomberg and was talking about Apple's products, mentioning that he loves Apple and wouldn't use any other computer, and said that he had an iPhone, an iPod Touch and lots of other iPods. Then McNamee said:

"They make great products. For media, they're fantastic, but our product, the Palm Pre, and again, I'm a board member of Palm, we're a huge investor in the company, so people understand the conflicts here. But, our product's just gonna run rings around them on the web. I mean, if you want to go to the web, it's going to be a million times, well not a million times; It's going to be several times faster, and that's a huge deal from us."

Then on Monday, Palm filed for Clarifications and Corrections on some of the stuff that McNamee had said during the interview. Number 5 on the list of clarifications and corrections is in regard to the "running rings around them" statement:

"With respect to the statements in the tenth paragraph of the transcript that the Palm Pre is “going to be a million times – well, not a million times – several times faster” than Apple, Inc.’s iPhone products and is “going to run rings around them on the web,” the Palm Pre is still under development and it is premature to state the speed at which the device accesses the web or the relative speed of the Palm Pre compared to the smartphone products of competitors."

Today, Dieter was kind enough to cover the Palm Pre Webcast live via Cover It Live. We didn't really get any "new" news on the Pre except for learning a little more about the plans required for the Pre. Plus Dieter reported on "How Many Cards is Too Many?" to have open on the Pre. There was a little confusion during the webcast when Matt Crowley mentioned something about "Anything more than 4 or 5 cards becomes unwieldy." Dieter sets us at ease about that comment.

But, back to the speed of the Web on the Pre. Is it faster than the Safari browser on the iPhone? Well, Kevin Tofel from jkOnTheRun was present at the Pre Webinar also, and he noticed how fast the browser was when Matt Crowley did a search on Google for Big12,  the conference basketball site www.big12sports.com, which is a pretty intensive site best suited for a powerful desktop browser. Kevin assumes that Crowley was using Wi-Fi, and he went to the same Big12 site on his iPhone to compare the speed. Kevin said that the Pre had fully rendered the complex site in about 8 seconds, and the same site on his iPhone took about 30 seconds. You can watch the sequence from the Webinar video that Kevin is talking about here.

Kevin notes that he doesn't know if the Palm Pre Webkit browser caches web pages from prior usage, but even it was it's still a tick in the Pre's advantage over the iPhone (whose caching is sub-par).  Kevin also mentions the fact that the Pre has the TI OMAP3 processor and Apple uses a different ARM solution from Samsung.  Great job at catching one of the little things in the webcast, Kevin!

So, was Roger McNamee correct when he said, "our product's just gonna run rings around them on the web" or were we looking at some made-for-demo speed?

 
Filed Under: News; Tags: palm pre, iphone, browser

Comments

Made for demo, obviously.

+1 scripted .

well, the video looks ridiculously fast. it's faster then firefox and chrome on my desktop. (both 9 seconds), but with the website in cache, the page is loaded instantly. And I presume this pages was cached on the pre.

someone should do a cache load of the website on their iPhone. for real speed comparison

iPhone doesn't do cache so even if it is cached on the Pre, it is faster

The imaginary pre vs the iPhone... I wonder which one will win! ;)

Mobile safari is incredibly slow, and for the record, my tmobile G1 loaded that page in 32 seconds on edge, so if the iphone was on 3g or wifi, then that is very sad.

What a load of bull.

It probably stored the files in a cache.
If it didn't, then wow...That's fast. =)

Imagine how much faster it will be on sprint 3g vs at&t crap 3g...if the wifi comparison is any indication..

It isn't.

I believe Sprints EVDO Rev-A is 3.5G, also, the Pre will have enhanced Rev-A.

This page is NOT cached. This is how fast the Pre Browser is! I just tried it on my Pre

Faster then a full-featured desktop browsers? says an anonymous person who claims to have a phone that almost nobody can get.

don't take offence, but I don't believe you.

The proof is in the.............Iphone is history.

I don't care which one is faster at this point. But when apple unveils their new iphone (March 15?) I bet they will have a release date and pricing info. It bothers me to no end that we're in March and the phone doesn't even have a tentative release date. First half of 2009 doesn't count.

What's more worrisome is that I constantly hear "early hardware, early software, beginning stages..." etc. So it's hard to have any confidence that they will meet a due date by June. I want a well seasoned/tried/practiced Pre ( I don't want it rushed) but I think the way Palm (and Sprint for that matter) has gone about their marketing is terrible.

Not to blame everything on Palm, local Sprint sales reps have gone around and given false dates to entice people to sign new contracts sooner as well as get the higher phone data plan. I know because we were told by a rep we had to get it before the feb 15 release, cause if we didn't we would get charges until the plan kicked in the following month. Now I'm stuck with a pricey plan and no phone.

I'm in love with the Pre and I'm skeptical about the cellular company it belongs to, Sprint.

Pricing will be 150-250, does it really matter what the exact price is?
Release date is between 04/01/2009 - 05/31/2009. Does it really matter what the exact date is?

Your dates aren't right, nor is your price. It's all speculation, but the most realistic date is late June.

agree

Which fyi... is also wishful thinking

Palm is a small company, and they don't have the resources to compete in today's smartphone market of iphone/G1/blackberry/htc, the pre is a very nice concept but unfortunately palm is not an able company to pull it through.

Sadly, I'm starting to agree with you here.

You're obviously implying that Palm does not have "the resources" based In economic theory. Other words you're saying Palm can't produce enough Pre's? That's an ignorant way of thinking, Palm said if anything, there 'might' only be 200,000 Pre's at launch. That is due to a shortage of touch-screen parts, NOT because Palm is short on resources. If Palms stock was fueled by speculation (what you're doing) it would not be on the rise. Forbes, CNN-Money, Yahoo-Finance and others have said Pam is in a very good position.

Off topic, but if you're going to bash demos for being 'obviously scripted' or say that it's all BS, at least have the courtesy to not hide behind the anonymous login.

Anyway, just because they specifically picked a website that they do well with, or planned out a demo, doesn't mean they're being misleading either. The Pre's processor is much more advanced than any other smartphone out there. It is fully possible that it's actual rendering speed. Let's wait for the final product and see for ourselves instead.

everybody here just needs to get a life stop ranting and raving just be patient the phone is not a life or death situation stop being groupies and enjoy what u have no wonder everybody hates america because of spoiled grown men that cry like all of you lol

It's a discussion, get over yourself. Everyone hates America for reasons far more significant. Don't be a moron.

So what are you ranting and raving about here? ;)

The only morons here are those who believe the Pre's browser is really that fast. Cardfan, I'm looking at you.

LOL You mean you hope its not that fast :)

My Sprint Mogul has EVDO revA. I just tried this with Opera 9.5 (native, not mini), and it was about 30 seconds to load the page. I had 2 bars, and I'm inside.

The processor is slower for sure (400mhz?) on this thing, and memory ain't so great.

Apparently, opera also doesn't cache, cuz I reloaded the page and it took about the same amount of time.

Skyfire loads it in 9 seconds. Skyfire is not rendering or fetching the page locally though.

My 3.6ghz dual core xeon desktop + chrome loaded in 6 seconds from the company super pipe.

From what I understand, webOS uses webkit, so its the same guts as safari. It'd probably come down to rendering speedups, hardware speeds and actual '3G' bandwidth, which can vary greatly. I've seen 60kB to 110kB/second on my phone.

I don't doubt that was cached. But also no doubt that it was a fast render, regardless.

Pre release date: June 20 +/-7 days.

Pre price: $250 +/-$50 with 2 year contract

Web page load time comparison to iPhone: over wifi and non cached paged 1.5-2.5x faster

Over network assuming best signal: 1.5-3x faster

Ya'll are retarded w/how much you complain and cry.

PS the touchstone is going to cost at least $30. Use that money to get an extra battery w/external charger if you have half a brain. Or at least wait til the chinese make an aftermarket touchstone for next to nothing.

Pre release date: June 20 +/-7 days.

Pre price: $250 +/-$50 with 2 year contract

Web page load time comparison to iPhone: over wifi and non cached paged 1.5-2.5x faster

Over network assuming best signal: 1.5-3x faster

Ya'll are retarded w/how much you complain and cry.

PS the touchstone is going to cost at least $30. Use that money to get an extra battery w/external charger if you have half a brain. Or at least wait til the chinese make an aftermarket touchstone for next to nothing.

By the way, you guys all did your comparisons wrong, including that guy with the video that originally did it.

You don't go to big12sports.com. you search google for big12 then click on the mens basketball link that comes up.

That page is WAYYYY less intensive than the full big12sports.com

retards

google g1 on wifi took me about 15 sec to load that big 12 men's basketball link.

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