iPhone 3GS: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

So now that the new iPhone is already here, it is time for some reviews, tests and comparisons. Is it the new iPhone faster and better phone than the old iPhone 3G? Apple claims that the new 3GS can accomplish the same tasks up to twice as fast as its predecessors. But, how does it compare to smart phones recently released from other vendors? And why not, is the new iPhone harder and stronger?

In this post I'm going to provide a summary and relevant links to the benchmarks published so far about iPhone 3GS performance.

Medialets has performed a JavaScript based benchmark tests using the SunSpider test suite on the iPhone 3G and 3GS, the T-Mobile G1 running Android, and the Palm Pre running webOS. SunSpider is a tool suite for benchmarking that enables cross-platform comparisons among the devices (it is based on web browsers tests). In the Medialets study, the iPhone 3GS outperformed the Palm Pre by a factor of three and the T-Mobile G1 by over a factor of five. It is also remarkable that iPhone OS 3.0 provides a nearly three-fold improvement in performance over OS 2.2.1 running on the same hardware.

AnandTech and iLounge have carried out another performance test for iPhone 3GS. The performance tests also include the comparison of iPhone 3GS with the old iPhone 3G, T-mobile G1, and the Palm Pre. AnandTech has published a nice chart that compares the speed opening browsers in each smart phone. The results show that iPhone 3GS is 122% faster in rendering WebPages in comparison to iPhone 3G, and 21% faster than Palm Pre.

You can also check out a live browsing speed comparison in this video:

When it comes to 3D, Daniel Pasco has performed some OpenGL ES speed test based on their own plasma application (very heavy on particle animation and CPU intensive), both on iPhone 3GS and an iPod touch. The result is that 3GS is close to four times faster than the 3G!

And recently, as stated on MacRumours, there have been evidences on the hardware side about a more powerful PowerVR graphics processor inside the 3GS: iPhone 3GS with the SGX535 (28 MPolys/s) versus Palm Pre with SGX530/1 (14 MPolys/s).

So, it seems that the new iPhone deserves the 'S' from speed.