Controversy: Android’s Nexus S vs. iPhone 4 with iOS 4.3

Yesterday we reported about some tests that had been carried out by the website Blaze, which said Android is much quicker at loading web pages than Apple’s iOS 4.3 software. But these tests have now been questioned.

According to reports the tests were carried out by not using Safari itself, but a poorly performing iPhone application. To recap, the tests showed the average time it took a web page to load on the iPhone, was around one second longer than that of an Android based Nexus S handset.

It was also found that the more complicated the web page the bigger the time difference was before it loaded. Blaze had said its benchmarks had used the recently released iOS 4.3, meaning that it took into account the new Nitro JavaScript engine of Apple’s new Safari browser.

But in fact it completely bypassed these improvements by using its own application instead of Safari. It has been reported before that these types of applications do not make use of the recent web acceleration features that are found in iOS 4.3.

To run an automated test on web page loading would be more difficult to perform using Safari, and would also not pick up more important differences between the two platforms. This would include usability and stability of the platform, and things like battery life. To find out more on this you can read the article by Daniel Eran Dilger at AppleInsider.

What do you think about this latest information?