IOS Completely Embarrasses Android In HTML5 Speed Tests
Given the numbers, LG might be better sticking to physical displays of 3-D like this one at the Mobile World Congress last week. Photos Charlie Sorrel (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
IOS runs HTML5 games a crazy three times faster than Android, according to a study by Spaceport.io. The tests were run on various hardware and software combinations, both for Android and iOS, and the results are pretty startling. And there’s an even more amusing data point: The Blackberry Playbook beat every Android device.
Hardware included the Samsung Droid Charge, Sony Xperia Play, Asus Eee Pad Transformer and Blackberry Playbook, amongst others. Software was Android versions 2-4, the Kindle Fire’s own Android fork and the Blackberry Playbook OS. On the iOS side were the iPhone 4/S and 3G, the iPod Touch 4G and both iPads, running a mix of iOS4 and iOS5.
The test: “How many images can be moved around a screen at one time, while maintaining a 30 frames per second (FPS) frame-rate?”
The iPad running iOS 5 smoked the competition. The iPad 2’s worst result was still better than the an Android tablet’s best result. Even the best of all Android results was only 50% better than the iPad’s worst score. Scathing.
What was the worst Android device? Motorola’s Droid 2, which “was not even able to maintain 30 FPS with a single moving object on the screen.” Compare this to the iPhone 3GS, a phone released almost three years ago, managed “50 moving objects at 30 FPS.” Suck that, Moto.
Spaceport.io is a company whose service takes fames written in Flash, Javascript and the like and translates them to run on various OS platforms. It also has something of a sense of humor. Normally these studies make for dry reading, but this one is pretty entertaining (download the PDF if you want to read it), with lines like “Android does not look terrible in this summary,” and “The Android tablet results are kind of suspect.” This last refers to an artificial increase in the Android tablet’s score as it wasn’t actually rendering all of the on-screen objects.
The bottom line — which we knew already– is that if you want to do anything on the mobile web other than search Google, you should be using Mobile Safari on any old iOS device.
- Via Venture Beat
Charlie Sorrel sits in his gadget nerve-center in Barcelona, Spain, and spits out words about various weird plastic widgets while the sun shines outside his iCave. Previously found at Wired.com's Gadget Lab covering cameras, power cables and sneaking in as much Apple-centric coverage as he could, Charlie spends his rare moments outside perched atop a bicycle and snapping photos. You can follow him on Twitter via 
