Motorola Droid RAZR Performance Preview: A Faster Browser
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Jason Inofuentes on October 18, 2011 1:35 PM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- TI
- Android 2.3
- Motorola
- Android
- OMAP 4
- Mobile
- Droid RAZR
When we published our preliminary iPhone 4S performance results we pointed out that the current state of stock Android (2.3.x) browser performance is pretty bad. Google improved browser performance significantly in Honeycomb, and will likely bring those optimizations to smartphones with Ice Cream Sandwich due to be announced later today. As we all know, Google picks an SoC and a hardware vendor for each major Android release - giving them early access to code as they work on developing the next version of Android. For ICS the hardware partner is obviously Samsung, which puts Motorola at a bit of a disadvantage for today's Droid RAZR launch.
There is good news however. Based on our hands-on time with the Droid RAZR it appears that Motorola has updated its browser with the move to Android 2.3.5. Browsermark and Sunspider numbers are now in-line with Honeycomb based tablets as well as the iPhone 4S - perhaps a preview of what we can expect from Ice Cream Sandwich. Note that these are all numbers we've produced, including the 4S numbers (from our upcoming iPhone 4S review).
Obviously this is only measuring javascript performance and not the full web browsing experience (much less Flash), but it's definitely a step in the right direction. Once we get our hands on a review sample we'll dive much deeper into the performance of Motorola's 7.1mm 4G LTE smartphone.
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ImSpartacus - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
Does the choice in SoC mean that we'll see ICS on the RAZR soon?I'm interested to see if the performance numbers might change when/if ICS hits the device.
Paulman - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
I didn't know that Android/Gingerbread 2.3.5 already has significant speed improvements over the older Gingerbread. This means that the Samsung Galaxy S II LTE (for example) which should be shipping with at least 2.3.5 can be expected to regain the browsing benchmark performance crown from the iPhone 4S!Potentially other Galaxy S II handset owners could update their phones for the speed improvement as well (they may have to use CyanogenMod or whatever for the time being).
Yay. Take that, iOS 5 :P (not hatin' - it's still a good OS/platform)
mongo lloyd - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
I've had official 2.3.5 for almost two weeks on my international SGSII.mongo lloyd - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
I get 3385 in sunspider 0.9.1, so no dramatic improvement.JasonInofuentes - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 - link
It's also worth discussing that the performance of your SGSII was already bolstered by a backing store and other improvements for speed. We don't know what black magic Motorola has put into their browser but we can't wait to go digging.Jason
kebab77 - Monday, November 7, 2011 - link
Older versions of Android use a single core, hence the speed difference.Anandtech appear to have failed to notice that iOS devices skip one of the benchmark tests in Browsermark and so it is completely pointless quoting the Browsermark results on Apple devices!
http://www.bestsmartphone.com/2011/10/11/browserma...
*.jpg - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
I would like to see how the EVO 3D fared vs. these other phones/tablets in the benchmarks.anandtech pirate - Monday, October 24, 2011 - link
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4416/hands-on-and-be...PWRuser - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
Bootloader is confirmed encrypted motofailwebmastir - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 - link
encrypted & locked are two different things, fyiit's locked.