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?
