TiPb iPhone 3G S vs. iPhone 3G Browser Speed Smackdown
Two iPhones enter, only one can be left standing. Which one will it be? Well, both devices got the Nitro JavaScript rendering engine boost courtesy of iPhone 3.0, but the iPhone 3G S brought a little gun to this knife-fight in the form of double the RAM, a faster GPU, and a super souped up processor with higher clock speed and phat’er pipes. (Think 486 vs. Pentium on the desktop).
So let’s just load up our friends CrackBerry.com, PreCentral.net, theiPhoneblog.com HQ, and Steve Job’s perennial New York Times test page and see.
(No, not which will win — we already know the answer to that! — but by how much?!)
June 19th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
I guess it comes down to whether the cost justifies the speed bump.
In my eyes: absolutely not. Now if we were comparing the 2g to the 3gs then yeah I’m definitely getting a 3gs.
June 19th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Very nice, I was doing something similar with mine but yours is much better video quality
June 19th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
@Truth – I use my phone for business and speed is the name of the game. For the average user it’s likely not worth it but I got upgraded after only having my iPhone 3G for 7 months at only $199 so I can’t complain – and now I have an additional “iPod Touch” for only $199
June 19th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Double the RAM!? (Sarcasm…)
The Kevin comment was classic…
June 19th, 2009 at 2:32 pm
SPEED!! I’m loving it! SOLD!!! I may just go ahead and get the 16GB now w/ this extra upgrade I have!! I’m sure next year will be something different so I’ll use the other upgrade for that!!
June 19th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
The difference in speed is amazing, great job at doing the side by side. This bump in speed makes the 3GS hands down the best smart phone of all time.
June 19th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Hey Rene, how much faster do you find Safari now with OS 3.0 than it used to be before?
June 19th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
I wanna see a 3GS vs. Pre showdown. Now THAT would be interesting. I’m getting my 3GS today, yay!
June 19th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Rene Ritchie,
Can you do a 3GS vs. Pre? Than would be sweet.
Also, a 2.2 vs. 3.0 Iphone (either 3G or 3Gs) would be nice too.
PS: I’m not getting a 3GS this year. Waiting for the multi-core thing in 2010
Thanks.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
Hey René
Your Bluetooth was ON on the 3G making it lose precious time rendering those graphics and java while trying to find Bluetooth devices nearby. This video is flawed. Better do a new one, no?
June 19th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Impressive…and moves me from the “no way I am upgrading” to “firmly on the fence, looking wistfully at the other side.”
One question, though — in the forums, several threads have mentioned a clean wipe as a way to improve your performance if your 2G/3G is bogging down. The 3Gs, being brand spanking new, is already in this state, but not, I presume, your year-old 3G. Did you clean wipe your 3G before this test, to equalize that factor, or are those threads mistaken that would have an impact?
June 19th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
What is the downstream capped at for your inet service? It seemed way too slow.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Using a stopwatch, these is how both iPhones measure:
Crackberry: 20 seconds (3G S) Vs 50 seconds (3G) – 150% faster / 2.5x Precentral: 12sec (3G S) V 35sec (3G) – 192% faster / 2.9x Tipb: 10sec (3G S) Vs 20sec (3G) – 100% faster / 2x NYT: 15s (3G S) Vs 39s (3G) – 150% faster / 2.6x
WOW!!! My iPhone 3G feels so ashamed… =/
June 19th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Very impressive from the 3G S.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
@Micheal Denny
You must have a very small business because most business users would tell you that the iphone is a very inadequate business device aside from browsing the web and the occasional attention grabbing **** app.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Turned BT off, reran, made no perceptible difference. Still gets killed in JavaScript parsing.
iPhone 3G S is even beating it when 3G is on Wi-Fi and 3G S is on HSPA
June 19th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
iPhone 3G basically stops dead for a few seconds, 3G S just smashes through
June 19th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
@ Unfair
Absolute Truth.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
@ Rene Ritchie
You sound like a salesman.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Totally agree with TRUTH
June 19th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
@Rene Ritchie
HILARIOUS MAN!!!1 love it!!
keep up the good work!!
HAHAHAHA
June 19th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
[DarthVaderVoice]Impressive. Most impressive.[/DarthVaderVoice]
June 19th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
considering the upgrade from 3G now MAYBE.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
Dieter is doing iPhone 3G S vs. Palm Pre rendering smackdown. Should be posted soon…
June 19th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
iPhone 3G Soooooo…. ;P
June 19th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
@Rene Ritchie on this site or PreCentrals?!
June 19th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Hey Rene, how about 3G S vs Magic/Galaxy/G1? Maybe a suggestion over to Android Central?
And possible a matchup between this and a Windows and Blackberry phone. Be nice to see it go against most of the competition.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
Oh…and I guess a Nokia also =]
June 19th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
They actually have a 3G S vs Pre speed video over on CNET if anyone is interested.
June 19th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
I’ve ran the same test on my 3G in conjunction with this video. The bluetooth he has on only slows down the rendering a faction of a second. The test w/ my 3G were darn near identical.
Although I could make fun of this guy’s lack of knowledge of hardware and how he states things, I won’t……oh what the heck.
“…and has better pipes….”???? WTF does that mean? The 3Gs comes with copper pipes as opposed to the 3G which comes with PVC?
June 19th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
great vid! I am very impressed with the speeds especially jumping up from a 1st gen phone
June 19th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
@iDavey CNET seemed more like a Sprint vs AT&T. Not Palm Pre vs iPhone 3gs.
June 19th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
I didn’t listen to the audio, but the whole test is flawed if you used both devices on the same internet.
you load up one site and of course the other device will have BW issues. Same as if I’m downloading a file on one laptop and attempting to load a webpage on another, there will be no BW left. The only way to TRUELY test it is to have both on separate internet connections that have the same BW capabilities.
June 19th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
@Rene: Howbout installing your favorite Speedtest App, and see if any of that apparent speed is due to better network stack/chips or if its ALL just the processor speed?
June 19th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
If you turn off Javascript on an ordinary iPhone or iPod Touch the pages load much faster than with Javascript On as shown in the video. I ran the same tests while watching the video on my iPod 2G WITHOUT the 3.0 update with Javascript disabled and my load times were fairly close to the load times of the 3G S. Most sites work well without Javascript. Ironically it is sites that are made specifically for Mobile Safari (iPhone optimized sites) that end up breaking when Javascript is turned off.
I just wish there was an easier/faster way to turn off Javascript without having to exit Safari. A Toggle to turn off Javascript for Jailbroken devices running SBSettings would be great but as far as i know one does not yet exist.
June 19th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
@lungho:
You can find out what he means here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_family
The 3Gs uses the ARM Cortex-A8 processor with a 13-stage superscalar pipeline. http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM_Cortex-A8.html
The older 3G use the ARM1176JZF processor which has a 8-stage integer pipeline. http://www.arm.com/products/CPUs/ARM1176.html
The thru-put of the processors differs dramatically due to the way instructions are pre-fetched, executed, and intermediate results dealt with.
Basics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_pipeline
So, long story short, I suggest Rene may know a thing or two more than you do about the hardware in iPhones.
June 19th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Got my iphone 3GS today . And I’m so glad with difference in speed and performance. Whoever says it’s not worth going from 3G to 3GS then definitely he/she doesn’t value speed or performance. If you still insist that it’s not worth then please try a game for example “Tap Tap Revenge” with a stereo Bluetooth and compare both, you ll notice a big time lag in 3G and 3GS plays smooth and no lags. Can’t wait for a jailbreak if possible so i can enjoy multitasking
June 19th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
We all value speed and performance.
We don’t all value that to the tune of 400-600 bucks.
June 19th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
why do people think that clearing the history makes your web browser run faster? i’ve never really understood that… there is no need to clear history for this test.
June 19th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
@mordenxp
If you listen to the context in which he uses technical terms, you can tell he doesn’t completely understand how hardware or even how the settings work. Although, this time, none of the goofs he made makes a huge difference in rendering times, his testing methods aren’t very scientific.
I think the 3Gs is a great product for Apple and better than the 3G, but this “test” isn’t a good example of that.
June 20th, 2009 at 3:37 am
IPhone 4.0 coming soon….
1)Flash player support 2)Quick back option without going to home screen while switching between apps. 3)File browsing and storing 4)Option to attach images, file etc from email app itself. 5)Multiple signature options 6)Manual rotate gesture option 7)Notes app should be more powerful word process (fonts, text size etc) 8)All Grouping of contacts for test message e.g. friend and family groups. 9)App for grouping key social networking sites(for posting universal photos, text to all social networking sites together. 10) Auto spell check in safari browser (like mozilla) when adding text in twitter, facebook leaving comments at blog etc. 11)Build in Flash in camera for night photo shot 12) Front facing camera for video Chat 13) Use cover flow for using multitasking third party apps (limit to 5 apps, not to drain the battery life) 14)Thin quick time player app to run video downloaded from web. 15)Group notification alert or not attended tasks(missed MMS, SMS, PHONE, Chat message, meeting, event etc)on single screen.
Roger Kent
June 21st, 2009 at 7:06 pm
@Michael Denney: Must be nice. I’m sure you probably added a line to your business account. Find it hard to believe that you managed $199 for only have the 3G for 7 months. Had mine for 10 months.