Tuesday, April 13, 2010

The great smartphone/pad shootout!

While waiting for my Droid to be serviced at the Verizon store, I went down to the Apple store in the mall to check out the much-ballyhooed iPad. I'll save my full reactions for later (though it's not anything you haven't heard before) to bring you a comparison of browser speed between the iPad and Droid.

This is not a terribly scientific study, but it should give you a rough idea of who each device performs in a roughly average environment. I ran SunSpider 0.9.1 on each device, operating over wifi and with nothing really going on in the background (but also without any specific avoidance of background apps). I'm using a stock Droid at 2.1 with the free version of the Xscope browser. Other than that, everything is standard config, with whatever apps happen to be on the iPad or Droid.

Without further ado, here is the spreadsheet:



As you can see, the iPad is about twice as fast as the Droid for most tests, with the Droid pulling ahead on the single "nbody" test. *Cue long tirade about how nbody is the only test which actually matters and the Droid is therefore superior to the iPad in every way, especially at raw browsing speed ;)*

I was actually surprised that the Droid did as well as it did, considering that it is a couple months older and has a significantly less-powerful processor. Hooray for mobile competition!

2 comments:

  1. If you overclock your Droid (which I do, why not? the battery hog is display anyway), you will have result like this:

    Over clocked droid runs faster than an iPad

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  2. @Gary I saw that article, and it was mainly what prompted me to run this comparison, since I'm not adventurous enough to overclock my Droid just to boost benchmark numbers. I wanted a good comparison of real-world, stock performance between the two devices.

    It is cool, though, that the Droid is capable of such performance (though I can't imagine the battery life is very impressive when it's OCed that much).

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