Just How Fast is Froyo's Browser?

If you have been following Google's IO conference and keynotes, you surely have not missed their latest incarnation of their Android operating system, named Froyo (short for "frozen yoghurt", following Google's tradition of naming their OS versions after desserts. Beats large cats in my book anyway, but don't tell Simba). You might have also caught their claim, undermined by numerous eyebrow-raising graphs, that Froyo boasts the fastest browsing experience ever.

As Froyo made a surprise appearance on Android phones around the world in the past few days, the benchmarkers have begun inspecting that claim. It turns out that while the claim is valid, another feature works against it: As usual the culprit's name is Adobe Flash. Hit the break to watch two videos on how fast Froyo really is, and just what an impact Flash makes to the whole experience. It gives credit to the recently uber-chatty Steve Jobs when he stated in his open later, that so far Flash just hasn't been convincing on mobile platforms. It looks like he wasn't exaggerating...

In Round 2 the Flash plugin is disabled. This lets the Froyo browser shine, and show its true potential. In many cases it seems to beat the iPhone by a significant amount of time: