Here’s the bottom line on the first speed tests of Android 2.2: without Flash 10.1, its browser handily beats all comers. But with Flash? It drops to the bottom of the heap. Ruh roh.
The fellows at PocketNow tested a Nexus One running Android 2.2 against an iPhone 3GS and Opera Mobile 10 on an HTC HD2. Load times on the Nexus One were far behind the iPhone’s and closer to, but mostly still behind, the HD2. And when Flash elements were on a page, such as a banner ad, scrolling up and down became really choppy and slow. Overall, it just looks like a worse browsing experience unless you’re looking to view/use Flash content specifically.
To be fair, the Flash plugin is still in beta and could be tweaked to improve performance, but these early tests line up pretty nicely with Apple’s argument against Flash on mobile devices.
So I guess it could come down to this: is it worth it? Is having a phone that allows you to run Flash worth the performance cut, or is it better to be protected from yourself with an iPhone that doesn’t support it? Or, in what may be the best option, do you just run Android 2.2 without Flash? [PocketNow via a href="http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/05/24/faster.android.hurt.specifically.by.flash/">Electronista]
Scott
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 7:13 AMI have on more than one occasion been on the street with nothing more than my phone trying to look up some online info only to hit the wall of not having flash. We can scream and yell at the web site developers all we like for not having a mobile version but the simple fact is they are going to take a while (if they ever do) to do mobile friendly versions and so we need flash for this transition period if for nothing else. Since getting a Desire and even just having flash lite I’ve found my mobile access to info greatly improved, to the point where I was able to lookup product info on a flash heavy site to check info before I bought – and that’s what I want in a smartphone.
I don’t expect flash to run like butter, I just want access to the info that is sometimes so infuriatingly only available in a flash object, giving me access to the entire web, not just bits of it.
Paul McManus
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 10:45 AMJust set add ons to load on-demand from inside the browser settings and you wont notice the difference until you actually want the Flash element to load.
My biggest gripe with Flash on the Nexus One after using it for a couple of days is that most Flash on the web is built for a mouse, keyboard and monitor. My fat fingers on a relatively small screen don’t work so great.
Bernhard de Kok
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 at 11:01 AMGoogle claimed it has the fastest mobile browser. hmmm.
With Flash turned off, I think its fair to say that the Nexus One running the beta version Android 2.2 solution has a faster browser than an old iPhone 3Gs.
But, the test was between a 1GHz processor (Nexus) compared to a one year old 600Mhz iPhone. That’s not really testing the browser speed difference, that’s not even testing Android OS against iPhone OS.
I would have thought that having a 66.67% faster processor would have yielded faster results than shown in that video.
This actually makes me think that the iPhone OS with Safari is doing a really good job with such old underpowered hardware. I can’t wait to see how the iPhone 4G will go (which, by the way will be out before Froyo). But I wonder, will they give use the 1GHz A4 processor that the iPad has, or will it be ramped down to 800MHz to save on battery consumption.
matt
Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 9:22 AMwow. bet I could make a browser that loaded even faster than any of those, if it didn’t load any images or text!
Craig Muldoon
Tuesday, June 15, 2010 at 6:11 PMNever run into a situation where flash was essential. I can’t even recall noticing the lack of flash while browsing, but i’m sure that if it were ever a problem that whatever info i was after i could get from elsewhere..
Jason
Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 12:17 PMInterstingly, I recently tried an Adobe Air app on Android 2.2 both with and without gpu mode enabled. it runs significantly better WITHOUT gpu, and much better than the flash equivalent in the browser. I’m wondering if gpu support is on by default in the flash player and thats why its performance is so bad?