We’re going to kick off the Palm Pre vs. iPhone 3G S excitement with a simple browser smackdown. The short version: the iPhone 3G S is faster in our video above, but the Pre is close and actually is edging out the iPhone after the just-applied 1.03 webOS update. The part you actually should pay attention to is "time to content," i.e. how long it takes to load up the stuff you actually want to read as opposed to the javascripty-bits. Bottom line: speed-wise there’s a hair’s-breadth between the two browsers, it’s so close that you really ought not be making your purchase decision based on it — or bragging about it either way.
Feature-wise, we give the edge to the iPhone 3G S — they are on version 3.0 while the Pre is just getting started at 1.02 / 1.03. The ability to pop up a link in a new browser window is quite nice — not to mention Autofill. I myself prefer the Pre’s Card metaphor to the in-app tabs of Safari, but that ’s a matter of taste.
Stay tuned for more as we pit these devices against each other!
Update: As noted in the comments and in a raft of emails, you can open links in a new card on the Pre with Opt + Space + Tap. It works, but Palm, really, Opt + Tap isn’t really doing anything here. Just saying. Thanks everybody!
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).
Well, at least kill the need for Flash on the iPhone? Daring Fireball says a simple “yes” to Yahoo! Tech’s question.
The idea is that a standards based technology, open and broadly used, could make redundant proprietary and sometimes bloated and buggy plugins like Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.
Apple’s Safari, including Mobile Safari on the iPhone, and Mozilla Firefox are already supporting HTML5 features. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer — so far — isn’t.
The article gives pros and cons for both sides of the debate. Since Apple is introduction the third generation of their iPhone software tomorrow, and still no Flash in sight, we likely have a good idea which way they’re leaning already…
According to BrowserSphere developers were told back in March that Safari would support the Geolocation JavaScript classes, which “work with the onboard location services to retrieve the current location of the device.”
So we guess IP addresses won’t be the only way for annoying web ads to try and localize us any more?
Daring Fireball has been looking into Google’s new Gmail WebApp for the iPhone and the technologies behind it. We already know the iPhone packs a version of Apple’s Safari Web Browser which is, in some ways, even more advanced than desktop Safari on the Mac. SQLite database caching, for example, for example users continue to archive or star messages even when there’s no internet connection. What’s more interesting to him, us — and likely users — is how that technology improves functionality.
I use the native iPhone Mail app to read email on my iPhone, but I’m tempted to start using the Gmail web app for one reason: I waste a lot of time switching back and forth between Mail and Safari after tapping a URL in an email. When using the Gmail web app, tapped links simply open in a new Safari tab. The iPhone Mail app needs a built-in web view, like what most popular iPhone Twitter clients offer.
Google’s Alex Nicolaou has blogged about the process.
We once wondered what the future of WebApps would be in a post-native apps world. Looks like Google expects — and is out to prove — things still look very bright.
Anyone else considering ditching the built-in mobile Mail app for some web-based Gmail?
Looks like another desktop Safari 4 Beta feature has found its way into the iPhone 3.0 version of the browser. Now, when you go to a site with an enhanced security certificate, the text on top of the browser turns green (like the green bar, we get it!), with little green lock icon beside it, and the name of the certificate’s trusted organization. For example, the above screenshots show how Apple’s order status page looks on iPhone 2.2.1 (top right) and iPhone 3.0.
What does this mean for users? In an age of increased phishing attacks, where bad sites try to trick you into thinking they’re your bank or shop and steak your login or credit card info, this is one more visual cue in your assessment process for determining if you can trust that the website is what it says it is.
Come iPhone 3.0, look for the green text on top of Safari and carefully check to make sure the company it identifies is the one you want to be dealing with.
According to our sources, the 3.0 beta still has some stability and speed issues, so that makes these results that much more impressive. While the overall average gives the iPhone 3.0 beta a 300 percent speed advantage, some of the individual tests show 6x, 8x, or even 11x improvements—the bitwise “AND” function even runs 16x faster than in the current version of Mobile Safari.
Should make the release version of the new, Nitro-powered Mobile Safari 3.0 fairly impressive, come summer! Bring on them multi-app Facebook pages, the iPhone will be ready! (Joking… a bit.)
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…
Apple has gotten some much-deserved heat in the past for not adapting anti-phishing measures into their Safari browser. Phishing is when “bad guys” make look-alike websites and try to trick users into entering personal data like passwords or credit cards numbers, so they can be used to break into user accounts or make fraudulent purchases. We’ve had some warnings about MobileMe phishing attacks in the past for example.
Safari 4 Beta on the desktop finally took steps to address this, and it looks like Apple is rolling the anti-phishing alerts out to Mobile Safari as well! As more and more people start using mobile browsers for banking, email, and other security-sensitive tasks, Apple can’t be too careful.
Also of note in the screen shot above is auto-fill. We’re guessing this works like the desktop, automatically entering common data in text fields like name, email address, etc. (Of course, the convenience comes at the expense of the very security mentioned above — balance your usage accordingly!)
Ars Technica has a great article up on the future of web design, involving 2D and 3D graphics and transformations, and what’s most interesting is that it’s the iPhone’s Mobile Safari browser that right now seems to be leading the way in surfacing this next-gen (Flash killing?) goodness for general users:
The WebKit team added CSS Transforms to nightly builds of WebKit back in October 2007, transforms that included scaling, rotation, skewing, and translation in 2D space. As the specification matured, 3D and animation capabilities were added. Eventually, the 3D transforms were broken out into a specification of their own. Though WebKit has had these 3D transform capabilities for some time, only Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod touch has them enabled.
Check out some of the other demos, and get the full scoop, over on Ars.
The iPhone Blog merged with the Phone different site in May of 2008. Both sites were founded on a premise that comes one from one of Apple's old slogans: Think different. The iPhone Blog: for people who dare to phone different.
