
Android 2.2 demolishes iOS4 in JavaScript benchmarks - yanw
http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/everything/~3/Fe2vBjQR9KU/android-22-demolishes-ios4-in-javascript-benchmarks.ars
======
wmeredith
This gets said a lot, but I think it's because it's true so I'll say it again.
Apple's products have almost always been lagging in terms of spec sheet.
Whether it's speed benchmarks or just a list of features they are always
behind. But it doesn't concern them or most of their customers.

People trying to beat them on spec never will because it's not the game
they're playing (at least not right now). They're building and selling user
experience; it's the sum of the parts that makes them great, not the quality
or performance of individual parts.

~~~
sjs
No kidding. This page[1] of Ars' Froyo review made me cringe, and I'm a geek
who understands all of this stuff! No way I could recommend this to friends &
family who aren't into tech for the sake of tech. If that's the cost of
removable and upgradeable storage count me out.

[http://arstechnica.com/open-
source/reviews/2010/07/android-2...](http://arstechnica.com/open-
source/reviews/2010/07/android-22-froyo.ars/2)

This particular problem is with the handset, not the OS, but it's basically
the flagship device. Ugh.

~~~
orangecat
By default Froyo manages moving apps between internal storage and the SD card
automatically. Normal users never have to see those (admittedly ugly) detail
screens. Your complaint is like looking at the man page for vi in Terminal.app
and concluding that Mac OS X is only usable by geeks.

~~~
earl
But they'll be bitten by this. The Android team are clearly not smart enough
to understand why people like the iPhone.

"One obvious downside of external application storage is that the software
installed on the SD card will only be available when the card is mounted on
the device. If you plug your phone into your computer and enable USB mass
storage mode, for example, the software installed on the SD card will not be
accessible. Due to this limitation, Google's developer documentation warns
that long-running software like background services, live wallpapers, and
widgets should not allow SD installation."

Can you imagine explaining this to end users? "Well, if you install to the SD
card to get more storage, you can't use this app when your phone is plugged
into your computer." This is just... stupid.

~~~
orangecat
_"Well, if you install to the SD card to get more storage, you can't use this
app when your phone is plugged into your computer."_

Plugged in is fine, it's only when the SD card is explicitly mounted as a USB
drive that the apps are unavailable. Still mildly annoying, but not as
annoying as the iPhone refusing to let you access its filesystem at all.

------
tomerico
Is there any commonly used web app which have cpu intensive javascript code?

I would assume that most of the time would be wasted on rendering and
downloading, and that javascript runs a fraction, even unmeasurable time.

From SunSpider website: _"This includes tests to generate a tagcloud from JSON
input, a 3D raytracer, cryptography tests, code decompression, and many more
"_

How often are this things really done in a browser, and are they really the
bottleneck?

~~~
redrobot5050
More and more of these tasks are getting to be commonplace in the client side
scripting of a website.

However, you raise a valid point: Mobile websites, the kinds most likely to be
served to you via MobileSafari, will likely not have things like Tag clouds or
3D raytracers for the foreseeable future.

Maybe there should be a mobile edition of the JS benchmarks run?

And also, as much as speed is an issue, what about a benchmark for compliance?
Safari/Webkit is still (to some sites) a red headed step child. The "it works
in FF and IE" mentality applies there. My bank is an example of that. It has
gotten better, but there are still plenty of web apps where webkit is
unsupported.

~~~
jarek
> there are still plenty of web apps where webkit is unsupported.

I hope one of these days we _will_ get to the point where web apps are
standards complaint, rather than rendering engine complaint.

We've largely won the battle on earning recognition and support for Gecko, but
now we have to do most of it over again for Webkit? What new and exciting
engine will we be griping about in two years? Does this make sense?

------
27182818284
I'd love to see how fast my Android phone runs with 2.2. Too bad I can't. One
thing the iOS releases have going for them is that users can actually get them
when they are released. 48 Days later, I still don't have the 2.2 update.

~~~
pkulak
Well, it's not really 48 days later. It's 48 days after the announcement, but
the final source wasn't released until a week or two ago.

~~~
27182818284
Umm I don't know for sure. I just went with the "Latest stable release" date
on Wikipedia's page about it.

~~~
jonknee
[http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/06/froyo-code-
dr...](http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/06/froyo-code-drop.html)

"Today is one of those days that has my heart racing; we’ve just released the
source code for Android 2.2."

...

"Posted by Tim Bray on 23 June 2010"

~~~
alunny
releasing the source != pushing out over the air OS updates

------
adam_albrecht
It seems to me that Apple really doesn't care all that much about the iPhone's
browser performance. Anything that presents a good alternative to the App
Store universe is not in Apple's best interest.

~~~
loewenskind
Then why are they pushing so hard on HTML5? If what you say were true they
should be trying to stall it, no?

~~~
adam_albrecht
Because web apps are still preferable to Flash

------
DeusExMachina
I don't see this as an advantage _per se_. Javascript on iPhone is indeed
slower, but not to the point that it renders web apps unusable.

It could become an advantage over iPhone if Google plans to boost web apps on
the platform. Otherwise this benchmark is meaningless to the average user, in
my opinion.

~~~
TrevorBurnham
It renders some web apps unusable. Try reorganizing your Netflix queue on the
iPad. Netflix's JS doesn't scale well to a queue with hundreds of items. On a
computer running a modern browser, this means a lag of a couple of seconds.
But on the iPad, it can be s full minute.

~~~
bruceboughton
(The post isn't comparing Android 2.2 to the iPad but rather to the iPhone 4
hardware and OS...)

~~~
mileszs
You're being downvoted because the article is comparing iOS4 to Android 2.2.
Both are operating systems. iOS4 is on both the iPad and the iPhone.

In fact, the iPad and iPhone 4 are very similar in hardware as well. The most
significant difference is in RAM, where the iPhone has twice as much as the
iPad.

Mentioning his or her experience on the iPad is completely valid.

~~~
roc
iOS4 isn't on the iPad and won't be for several months.

That said, _of course_ faster javascript is a benefit. Shaving even fractions
of a second off web operations has huge benefits for users and results in much
higher usage and happier customers.

When the performance bumps are _imperceptible_ , it will be time to make a
distinction. But on mobile devices that's still quite a ways out.

~~~
redrobot5050
And that said, the CPU of the iPad is believed to be 1GHz, where the iPhone 4
CPU is believed to be a 750MHz model.

Its likely that the experience will be faster on the iPad when iOS 4 comes out
for it in October.

------
Finster
The most interesting part of this will be how Gruber eventually spins this...
can't wait to see that.

~~~
theBobMcCormick
My guess is he'll be completely silent about it, UNTIL there's some future iOS
update the lets iOS score higher in the same benchmark. _Then_ it'll be an
example of Apple's attention to detail and planning, and how Google doesn't
care about their user experience. :-)

~~~
orangecat
Exactly. Just like pixels per inch, where it didn't matter that the Droid and
N1 were massively superior to the iPhone for months. Then the iPhone 4 comes
out with slightly higher PPI than the Droid and now it's all about the magical
retina display.

~~~
ugh
Sigh. That’s just not true. Here is what Gruber said about Nexus One’s screen
(January 2010):

 _“The high pixel density of the display is marvelous for reading text.
Letterforms are, as you’d expect, very crisp. My biggest gripe about the Nexus
One display is that certain colors are way over-saturated. All skin tones look
very orange to me. Everyone gets that spray-on tan look. Reds, pinks, and
especially oranges all go fluorescent. In short, I love the pixel density and
brightness (and, so far, the battery life), but I do not like the color
reproduction. I don’t know if that’s the nature of OLED, or if it’s specific
to the Nexus One.“_

— <http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/01/19/nexus-one-oled>

------
narkee
Personally, I'd rather see a aggregate subjective ratings of "responsiveness"
and "speed", rather than raw horsepower, as it were.

If the end goal is enhancing user experience, why not benchmark against those
metrics?

~~~
joe-mccann
And what would be examples of benchmarking a subjective experience? I mean, a
shitty JavaScript engineer can make any UX shitty regardless of speed of
JavaScript tests, whereas a good JavaScript engineer can make a UX good with a
crap interpreter.

~~~
narkee
Right, so it's entirely appropriate to benchmark arbitrary computational
metrics, but benchmarking UI metrics is inconceivable?

I don't understand your argument - true shitty engineers can ruin a UI, as
well as they can ruin a JS interpreter. The point of testing and benchmarking
is to evaluate the relative "performance" in each of these domains.

Measuring page loads on an array of popular, representative websites, or
measuring the latency between user interactions and some visible response are
some examples.

Also, having a group of real people give subjective ratings I think carries
more weight than people give it credit for.

------
Tyrannosaurs
That's great because that's the main thing most people look at when they're
buying a phone. Forget the display and the camera, what are the JavaScript
benchmarks like?

Don't get me wrong, it's good that these sort of enhancements are made and
that the platforms drive each other on in this area, but it's not actually
going to sell any phones because the gap will never become big enough to
become a genuine selling point.

------
joshfinnie
Seems like a duplicate of [<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1493937>]. I
really wish there was a way to stop the blatant duplicate submission. This is
of their feeds.arstechnica.com instead of the already submitted
arstechnica.com article.

Maybe this is coincidental, but I am not sure anymore...

~~~
smokinn
That would make for a good feature request.

On the right of flag we could add "merge with" and take a news.yc url and if
enough people submitted the same url a mod could merge all the comments into
the old story.

~~~
joshfinnie
I have been thinking of this for some time. A "merge with" would be great to
help the clutter and then the good conversations that happen would not be lost
once one is closed.

------
MWinther
Is there something fundamentally different in the approach taken in Froyo that
makes for this kind of speed improvement?

~~~
redrobot5050
Everything has been enhanced by a JIT compiler for the apps. It should result
in a 250-300% speed-up in real-world usage on most devices.

------
borisk
I won't be surprised if V8 is faster than the laggy Java Dalvik JIT VM in 2.2.

------
sscheper
I don't care. iPhone 4. I want iPhone 4.

~~~
antidaily
I get the reference. Funny. (if you haven't seen the video
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg&feature=playe...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg&feature=player_embedded))

------
wazoox
I just benchmarked my Palm Pre against my collegue HTC Android phone, and the
Pre beats the HTC hands down : V8 score 52 to 9...

~~~
jbellis
You don't say which HTC phone it is, but I don't think any of them have 2.2
yet...

~~~
ratsbane
The Nexus One is made by HTC and many of them, including mine, have been
upgraded to 2.2. I agree with your original point, though: what version of
Android OS and Palm was he comparing?

~~~
wazoox
Android 1.5 vs WebOS 1.4.2. No Android 2.x device is apparently available in
France ATM.

------
tumult
iOS 4 demolishes Android 2.2 in not responding to touch events like molasses

~~~
spot
got anything quantitative to back that up? have you even run 2.2?

~~~
tumult
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2316004/Mobile%20Photo%20Jul%207%2C%...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2316004/Mobile%20Photo%20Jul%207%2C%202010%202%2030%2045%20PM.jpg)

Had to take it with my iPhone 4, so it's not included in the picture. Before
you ask, I'm a mobile developer.

------
tbone28
Good for Android. They should be good at something. At least one thing.

