Palm Pre Browser nearly 50 Percent Faster than iPhone 3G

June 8th, 2009 by Todd Haselton  

preWooowee the Palm Pre is hot and its browser is just as smoking. We’ve started to put the Palm Pre head to head (to head) against the iPhone 3G and the T-Mobile G1 to see how its browsing speeds stack up. Although the iPhone 3GS was just announced, and may offer much faster browsing speeds, the Pre is already tackling the iPhone 3G. In round one, we tested the phones in our office in New York. We started by by first clearing the cache and then launching three full HTML Web pages: the New York Times, our own LAPTOPMag.com, and NationalGeographic.com. We sat by with a stop watch and nabbed the time of each browser just as soon as the page finished loading. The Palm Pre won hands-down in every single 3G browsing test, besting the iPhone by a minimum of 15 seconds for every page, and in some instances, by nearly a full minute. The Palm Pre loaded the three sites in an average of 27.6 seconds, while the iPhone loaded them in an average of 57.3 seconds. With Wi-Fi turned on, the Palm Pre finished loading every Web site except Laptopmag.com before the other two phones were finished. If the Palm Pre becomes as popular as the iPhone, will Sprint see a similar network crunch to AT&T, considering that its customers now have a phone actually worth browsing on? Stay tuned for follow-up tests in different locations and comparison tests with the iPhone 3Gs later this month. palmprevsiphonevsg1 Get a feeling for how little you’ll be waiting with the Pre in our video of the three phones loading LAPTOPMag.com.






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6 Responses to “Palm Pre Browser nearly 50 Percent Faster than iPhone 3G”

  1. Tianran Geng Says:
    June 9th, 2009 at 5:36 am

    The test is somehow misleading. I’m currently staying in China and even my iPhone can access the laptopmag.com much faster via wifi than it appears in your test.

  2. Todd Haselton Says:
    June 9th, 2009 at 11:37 am

    We loaded the sites with a 3G connection not with Wi-Fi.

  3. taber Says:
    June 9th, 2009 at 11:24 pm

    Any chance we can get a speed comparison using wifi? Networks vary wildly throughout the country, it’d be nice to see the network taken out of the equation and see how the software and hardware alone compare.

    To be completely fair you’d have to test against locally hosted websites, but I won’t go that far, a small average of the above would suffice for me.

  4. Jeffrey Says:
    June 10th, 2009 at 6:13 pm

    You must be in a bad 3G service area for AT&T. I’m in Southern CA and my iPhone 3G loaded your page in 25 secs. I even cleared my cache before testing it.

  5. Dave Swartz Says:
    June 12th, 2009 at 7:22 pm

    A test in a WiFi environment would put the browsers on each of the devices in an equal test. Your 3G test is not meaningful since the 3G strenght and capacity of each of the providers varies by location and the location you used for testing may or may not have had a better coverage from your Pre provider. You did not measure the relative speed of the different browsers, you measured the sum total of provider, processor (and memory), and browser for each of the devices at that one location at that one time. You should have published the Wifi chart as part of this article. Also note that OS3.0 for the 3G will release in a few days changing the game again even for users that do not upgrade their 3g phones.

  6. Johnny Poulos Says:
    August 12th, 2009 at 5:23 pm

    WOW, there is whole lotta butt-hurt going on here. I have the Palm Pre, and I used to own a Iphone and I can safely say that the Palm Pre is much more functional, intuitive and is downright faster. Sorry Apple nerds, swallow your pride and check one out instead of whining on the net about how superior your Iphone is when you haven’t even touched one yet.

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