Apple: Blaze study on iPhone 4 browser performance 'flawed'

17.03.2011
Apple on Thursday called that showed the Android-based Nexus S smartphone browsed the Web 52% faster than the iPhone 4 to be "flawed."

The tests, conducted by Blaze over the past two weeks, concluded that both phones were fast, but the Android device was about a second faster on average and beat the iPhone 84% of the time in loading Web pages from the Fortune 1000 companies. In all, .

But Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller said in an interview that the Blaze testing was "flawed because they didn't actually test the Safari browser on the iPhone." Instead, Blaze relied on the results from the embedded Web viewer in the iPhone, she said, which didn't take advantage of recently-added Safari Web performance optimization software.

"Despite this fundamental testing flaw, they still only found an average of a second difference in loading Web pages," Muller said.

Blaze CTO Guy Podjarny said in response that the testing it conducted was done "under the assumption that Apple would apply the same updates to their embedded browser as they would their regular [Safari] browser. If this is not the case -- and according to Apple's response, it's certainly possible -- the embedded browser might produce different results."

Podjarny said Blaze would be "more than willing" to create a new report if Apple decides to apply the Web performance optimization to the embedded Web browser.