Apple has always had a tendency to hype up its statements about the speed of its devices by using just the right benchmarks and just the right products to compare them to. When it comes to the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 3.0 update, however, it looks like Apple might actually have understated some of the speed gains it advertised. Medialets, a mobile advertising and analytics company, ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark on the iPhone 3G with the old and new OS versions, as well as on the 3GS. In Medialets’ tests, the speed of the iPhone 3G with the 3.0 almost tripled, and the new iPhone 3GS is another 3 times faster in completing the SunSpider benchmark than the 3G with the 3.0 release.
Maybe even more interestingly, the current generation iPhone 3GS only takes 12 times as long to complete the benchmark as a 2GHz Core 2Duo MacBook. This is obviously still a huge difference, but at this rate, we will probably see some pretty incredible performance on the next generation of mobile devices.
Good for Mobile Web Developers
Of course, these are benchmarks and don’t necessarily correlate directly into a superior user experience, but it is good to see that even iPhone 3G users will see significant speed gains from the 3.0 release. This should give mobile developers quite a boost, as they can now develop and run more complex, cross-platform compatible web apps that won’t be hindered by the mobile browser’s performance, though the Android-powered G1 is still pretty slow according to Medialets and the Palm Pre sees the same performance as a 3G with the 3.0 OS.
For now, however, there are also still a few million iPhone 3G users who haven’t updated their phones’ operating system yet…
