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

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