Palm Pre Webcast Tidbit: Browser Nearly 4x Faster than iPhone (Updated with video)

I’m slightly bummed by the webcast presented by Palm and Sprint. There wasn’t much earth-shattering news here; it was a walkthough of the UI, a discussion about Synergy and info on the Sprint services that the Palm Pre will support. No updated news on pricing or availability at this point. There was one interesting tidbit in the demo when Matt Crowley, product line manager at Palm, did a Universal Search demo.

It was nice to see the Bluetooth app appear when he typed the letter “B.” Adding an “I” showed two of his contacts that had a “BI” in their name. Matt went the full monty by searching Google for Big12. That’s when it got interesting. He went to www.big12sports.com to check out the conference basketball site. It’s a pretty intensive site (shown) that’s best suited for a powerful desktop browser. I’m assuming that he was using Wi-Fi. I searched for and then hit the same site over Wi-Fi on my iPhone, and here’s where it got very interesting.

The Pre had fully rendered the complex site in around 8 seconds. Same site on my iPhone? About 30 seconds. Obviously, I don’t know if the Palm Pre Webkit browser caches web pages from prior usage. I know my iPhone doesn’t, so even if this page load speed was based on cache, it’s still a function not offered on my iPhone. Again, I saw this in real-time. Hit the Big12 site on your device and see how long it takes to render and use. Heck, why not leave a comment with the platform you used as well as the browser?

We already knew that Palm went with a high-end TI OMAP3 processor, while Apple opted for a different ARM solution from Samsung. I’m not losing sight of the fact that my iPhone hardware is nearly 2 years old, but the performance that I saw when browsing on the Pre was staggering. Bear in mind: nobody from Palm nor from Sprint mentioned any performance numbers. They didn’t make any comparisons to other devices. This is simply what I observed from the webcast, timing the performance and sharing the observation.

Update: Here’s the sequence I described above so you can see what I saw.

http://v.wordpress.com/V613zAHw

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