Apple iOS 5 trounces Windows Phone browser in speed tests

A video uploaded to Nokia blog My Nokia blog from YouTube user "359gsm" on Monday showed the new Windows Phone 7-based Nokia Lumia 800 coming in dead last against two iPhones in a battery of speed tests, mustering its best performance with a second-place finish in HTML 5 "speed reading."

According to the complete scores, the 800MHz dual-core iPhone 4S running Apple's latest version of iOS 5 handily took the top spot in all of the five browser benchmarks performed, being more than twice as fast as the single-core 1.4 GHz Nokia Lumia in most metrics. Results from the JavaScript-heavy Sunspider benchmark marked the greatest disparity between the two platforms, and saw the 4S more than triple the speed of its Windows Phone rival.

The last-generation iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3 also beat the Nokia in most cases save for the HTML5 Speed Reading benchmark, however an upgrade to iOS 5 brought the year-old 1GHz Apple handset within three frames per second of the newer Windows Phone's score.

The Lumia 800 is Nokia's top-of-the-line smartphone model, and the first handset released after the company abandoned its Symbian smartphone OS in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 in February 2011. Unlocked versions of the device are showing up on online retailers' sites and while an official U.S. release has yet to be announced, the Finnish phone maker is expected to debut a Windows Phone 7 handset at CES on Jan. 9.

Microsoft's newest smartphone OS has failed to gain traction and accounted for barely 5 percent of entire U.S. smartphone market at the end of November 2011.

Full scores are below:

Browsermark test (higher score is better):

1. iPhone 4S (iOS 5) - 86,702
2. iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3) - 37,503
3. Nokia Lumia 800 (WP7.5 Mango) - 30,452

Speed Reading test (higher FPS is better):

1. iPhone 4S (iOS 5) – 60 fps
2. Nokia Lumia 800 (WP7.5 aka Mango) – 40 fps
3. iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3) – 2 fps (~37 fps with iOS 5 upgrade)

Sunspider test (lower time is better):

1. iPhone 4S (iOS 5) – 2266 ms
2. iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3) – 4018.2 ms
3. Nokia Lumia 800 (WP7.5 aka Mango) – 7188.7 ms

HTML5 Test (higher score is better):

1. iPhone 4S (iOS 5) – 296
2. iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3) – 210
3. Nokia Lumia 800 (WP7.5 aka Mango) – 141

Acid3 Test:

Three-way tie

• iPhone 4S (iOS 5) – 100/100
• Nokia Lumia 800 (WP7.5 aka Mango) – 100/100
• iPhone 4 (iOS 4.3) – 100/100