“So far, Safari on the iPhone and Opera Mini have been the best choices for ramping up the browsing mojo, but a video shown during last week’s Palm Pre webcast has us all a-flutter. The Pre already has our spider senses tingling with its sexy user interface and wireless charger, but now we smell its browser may also be something special,” Flora Graham writes for Crave at CNET.
“In the webcast, Palm showed the Pre visiting the US university basketball site Big12sports.com. It’s a graphics- and JavaScript-heavy site, and it took over 30 seconds to load on our iPhone over Wi-Fi. But in the Palm video, as shown on mobile blog jkOnTheRun, the Pre only took about 7 seconds to display it,” Graham writes.
“There’s no way to know if the Pre browser was loading the site from a cache, but even that would be news — the iPhone doesn’t do caching. The Pre browser is based on WebKit, so it’s a cousin to the iPhone and Mac OS X versions of Safari. Here’s hoping it’s slick enough to make them look like inbred Cornish cousins,” Graham writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Our headline is meant to call attention to the ridiculousness of an article that is headlined “Palm Pre browser ‘4x faster’ than iPhone” despite the fact that the author tests only one site, is pitting a vaporous non-shipping piece of unpriced buyout bait against a well-established and revolutionary shipping product, using a random “Wi-Fi” Internet connection (with no mention of what type of connection to the ‘Net that Wi-Fi hub offers) vs. a video – one day ahead of Apple’s iPhone 3.0 announcements. Come on now, they both use Apple’s WebKit. Palm Pre, if it ever does ship, is likely to be about the same speed, not “4x faster” or, for that matter, 4x slower, either. This is not a serious test. In fact, it’s no test at all; it’s simply a very stupid article that amounts to nothing more than blatant hit-whoring by Flora Graham and CNET.
