The bigger story, of course, is not only do we have several great devices pushing competition and better serving users these days, but Mobile WebKit (the rendering engine behind Apple’s Safari, Google’s Chrome Lite, Palm Pre’s browser, and Nokia S60 (tip of the hat to Sascha Segan) has become the mobile internet platform.
That it’s relentlessly standards based, scales elegantly from desktop (where it ironically holds minimal share) to handset, and is continually being improved upon makes us especially happy for all concerned devices.
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).
Of course, we mentioned that on Sprint, lacking simultaneous voice and data, even a million times zero is still zero. Less flippantly, however, when Safari 4 Beta shipped for the desktop with its new ultra-fast Nitro (formerly SquirrelFish) rendering engine, we figured it would only be a matter of time before that scaled down to the iPhone’s version of Safari (based on the same WebKit foundations as desktop Safari, as is the Palm Pre browser and Android Chrome Lite).
Wayne Pan has braved the NDA waters and published JavaScript benchmarks for iPhone OS 3.0, and they are impressive — with results ranging between 3× and 10× faster than iPhone OS 2.2. And I’ll confirm that MobileSafari on iPhone OS 3.0 passes my simple “could be Nitro” recursion depth test.
From what we’ve seen of 3.0, it seems that way to us as well. Along with HTML5, CSS, 2D and 3D animation, anti-phishing, AutoFill, etc., it will be interesting to see what Apple and the WebKit team can pull of by the time iPhone 3.0 launches this summer…
