Apple's iPhone 4 and 4S Deemed Faster Than Nokia's Lumia 800 in Browser Benchmarks

[Akshay Masand]

A recent unofficial benchmarking video shows that Microsoft’s native Windows Phone 7.5 Mango browser lags behind Apple’s Safari for iOS in various speed tests. What is more surprising is that Nokia’s latest Windows Phone offering, the Lumia 800 is even outperformed by an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3. The information comes from a YouTube user by the name of “359gsm” found on a Nokia blog named My Nokia Blog.

The video shows the new Windows Phone 7 based Nokia Lumia 800 coming in dead last against two iPhones in a battery of speed tests, where its best performance was a second place finish in HTML 5 “speed reading.” According to the complete scores, the 800 MHz dual-core iPhone 4S running Apple’s latest version of iOS 5 easily took the top spot in all five of the browser benchmarks performed, being more than twice as fast as the single core 1.4 GHz Nokia Lumia in most metrics. The results from the JavaScript-heavy Sunspider benchmark marked the greatest disparity between the two platforms, where the 4S saw more than triple the speed of its Windows Phone rival.

What makes the whole thing further depressing for Nokia and the Windows Phone platform is that the last-generation iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3 also beat the Nokia in most cases except for the HTML5 Speed Reading benchmark. An upgrade to iOS 5 brought the year old 1 GHz Apple handset within three frames per second of the newer Windows Phone’s score though.

It should be noted that the Lumia 800 is Nokia’s top of the line smartphone model and is also the first handset released after the company abandoned its Symbian smartphone OS in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 in February 2011. Currently, unlocked versions of the device are showing up on online retailers’ sites while an official U.S. release still has yet to be announced. The Finnish phone maker is expected to debut a Windows Phone 7 handset at CES on January 9th as well. Microsoft’s latest smartphone operating system has failed to gain traction thus far, accounting for barely 5% of the entire U.S. smartphone market at the end of November 2011.

For those of you who are interested in finding out the exact performance from the test, you can read the full scores below:

Browsermark test (higher score is better):

1. iPhone 4S (iOS 5) - 86,702

2. iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3) - 37,503

3. Nokia Lumia 800 (WP7.5 Mango) - 30,452


Speed Reading test (higher FPS is better):

1. iPhone 4S (iOS 5) – 60 fps

2. Nokia Lumia 800 (WP7.5 aka Mango) – 40 fps

3. iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3) – 2 fps (~37 fps with iOS 5 upgrade)


Sunspider test (lower time is better):

1. iPhone 4S (iOS 5) – 2266 ms

2. iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3) – 4018.2 ms

3. Nokia Lumia 800 (WP7.5 aka Mango) – 7188.7 ms


HTML5 Test (higher score is better):

1. iPhone 4S (iOS 5) – 296

2. iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3) – 210

3. Nokia Lumia 800 (WP7.5 aka Mango) – 141


Acid3 Test:
Three-way tie

• iPhone 4S (iOS 5) – 100/100

• Nokia Lumia 800 (WP7.5 aka Mango) – 100/100

• iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3) – 100/100

Source: My Nokia Blog

[sTrAnGe mOdS]

Haha, silly Windows phones.

[rabbit_]

Apple ftw

[Airwaves182]

Windows phone is way better then android!! & almost the iPhone. Imo

[Sk8r789456]

Why is the iPhone 4 on ios 4? ios 5 runs faster

[duromega]

I like windows phone better than android

[KraXik]

Windows phone is way better then android!! & almost the iPhone. Imo

Wyndwarriors OS7 is the answer for you!

[redstar299]

Who cares no one uses crappy windows phones anyway .. Bring on the 4s jailbreak

[sikdaz]

windows phones are boring!

[iLoveWindows&iPhone]

Who cares no one uses crappy windows phones anyway .. Bring on the 4s jailbreak

Dumb.

[Colby21]

Just did this on my Lumia and got 58fps while my ip4 ios5.0.1 got 40fps

[Germanese]

I got 37 FPS on my iPhone 4 5.0.1 and 3589.5ms xD
Yeah 5.0.1 does seem to be little faster on the benchmarks.

But the Nokia isn't much off, how much faster or slower are the androids ?
If they all in the same ballpark, that means the companies need to innovated more LOL to be better xD than the competitor.
The more competition the more innovation the more new stuff we consumers will see, else this is just good enough.

[GmAz]

And yet it was still the first phone to display the results. All phones were on wifi, shouldn't the faster phones finished the test faster and displayed the results?

Also, why isn't the iPhone 4 on iOS 5? Thats like saying my new quad core computer boots faster running vanilla WinXP than it does Win 7.

[iLoveWindows&iPhone]

My BrowserMark Score: 51940

iPhone 4 (5.0.1) Jailbroken

[iFrosty]

Why is the iPhone 4 on ios 4? ios 5 runs faster

I asked the same question...

It really doesn't make sense to have the iphone 4 on ios 4 unless they were trying to convey how far ios has come within a year. But i highly doubt that.

[iLoveWindows&iPhone]

I asked the same question...

It really doesn't make sense to have the iphone 4 on ios 4 unless they were trying to convey how far ios has come within a year. But i highly doubt that.

I bet they were curious as to how big of a difference iOS can make. Also, it helps highlight the fact that the OS plays a very large roll (or can at least) in a devices performance, further pointing out the fact that its not all about the hardware. What better way to illustrate this then show how much faster a iPhone 4 gets with just a updated iOS.

[Germanese]

So Lumina is the N9 ? with windows ? instead of their prioritary crap ?
What about any one loading up Android to that thing ?

[kyserver]

Wyndwarriors OS7 is the answer for you!

OS7:Revive is more polished. It was a heck of a trouble to set up though; had to SSH into the theme's folder and transfer some files over to get the live tiles working properly.

And to everybody saying that WP sucks, it doesn't. It's by far the most clean, intuitive, useful, and powerful OS I've used. The live tiles are brilliant, the keyboard is fantastic, the app layout is great, and the UI is beautiful. The only reason people aren't buying into it is that it has the brand "Windows", which we all know is a tarnished name that everyone associates with BSoDs. It just doesn't happen anymore. I run W8 as my daily driver on my MB Air and it's a flawless OS. I think it gives OS X a run for its money. Same goes for Windows Phone. The OS is great. I think Microsoft is finally learning to innovate and we need that in a world where Google and Apple have stagnated their innovation completely and aren't doing much new. If you think it sucks, you need to actually go down to T-Mobile, Sprint, or an AT&T store and try it out. You'll be surprised. Microsoft is definitely causing Google and Apple to lose some sleep at night.

[metaserph]

Here's what I have to say to WP/Droiders: Can you make your device "operate" in the same way the iPhone does, full functionality? Because, my iPhone can! Same thing back in the day when I ran MacOS X, Windows NT, XP, Ubuntu from the same hardware. Not talking about themes but actual fully functional. Don't get me wrong, I think WP are the best they've had on that side of the fence. But with my iPhone I can have it all. We have the best of all worlds. Anyways...