Nokia Lumia 800 vs iPhone 4S vs Galaxy SII Browser showdown

Day two of Nokia World 2011, and Nokia loaned us a new Lumia 800 to get to grips with at the show. We couldn't help but pit the Lumia 800 against two of its key rivals – Apple's iPhone 4S and the Samsung Galaxy S II – to see how the browser holds up. With many smartphone users spending a huge amount of their mobile time on the web, that's a key element of the owner experience. Read on for our comparison videos and more.

Apple was keen to point out the speed of its browser technology with the iOS 5 upgrade at the launch of the iPhone 4S, and we were seriously impressed by how quickly it rendered and loaded pages in our iPhone 4S review. Side-by-side with the Lumia 800, that optimization is clear. With the cache cleared and each on the same WiFi connection, the iPhone 4S led the way to the mobile version of the SlashGear homepage, the Nokia a few seconds behind. It was the same loading the full version of SlashGear, with Apple's handset pulling ahead of the Nokia. It looks as though Internet Explorer on the Lumia 800 does some of its rendering in the background, before showing the results on-screen, and so we were often able to begin reading first on the iPhone before each page finished loading.

Nokia Lumia 800 vs iPhone 4S browser load speed test

Moving to the Galaxy S II, Samsung's smartphone certainly brought the most power to the table (sorry – Chris says 1GHz in the video, but the dual-core Exynos in the GSII runs at 1.2GHz). We first tested with the Samsung browser set to load Flash on-demand (neither Windows Phone nor iOS support Flash, unlike Android). Head-to-head, the Galaxy S II brought up both SlashGear and Android Community slightly faster than the Lumia. Surprisingly, pages loaded slightly slower on the Galaxy S II when plug-ins like Flash were set not to run.

Nokia Lumia 800 vs Galaxy SII browser load speed test

All three browsers have pinch-zoom, which worked smoothly, as well as text reflowing. Once loaded, page navigation was smooth across the board. The differences in rendering will, of course, be very much dependent on the connection you have at the time – if you're on EDGE or 3G, for instance – and so this side-by-side performance shouldn't be seen as the final word on how the Lumia 800 handles browsing. Still, we'd like to see Nokia and Microsoft polish up the web experience on Windows Phone some.

Be sure to check out the rest of SlashGear's coverage of Nokia World 2011 here.

Nokia Lumia 800 hands-on 1

Nokia Lumia 800 Hands-on 2

Nokia Lumia 710 hands-on

Nokia Asha 303, 300 and 200 Hands-on

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