The once-mighty BlackBerry brand of smartphone from Research In Motion may have lost its way somewhat over the past couple of years, but a couple of browser tests carried out by The Gadget Masters suggests there’s still plenty of life left in the old dog yet. Testing the BlackBerry 10’s browser against Internet Explorer and Safari on Windows Phone 8 and iOS respectively, the BlackBerry come out on top. More details, and a demonstration video, after the break.
RIM has had to go back to the drawing board with BlackBerry 10, but having spent a great deal of time compiling the software, it looks as though the mobile market has a real contender on its hands. iOS and Android are considered the “Big Two,” with Windows Phone 8 also looking to gain some traction, but if the WebKit-based browser on BB10 is to be taken as a sign of things to come, the reinvention of BlackBerry should be taken very seriously indeed.
The Gadget Masters tested the Web browser rendering speed of a Dev Alpha B smartphone running BB10, versus an Apple iPhone 5 running on the latest iOS 6, and an HTC Windows Phone 8X running Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8. Now, with the iPhone 5 revered as one of the fastest general performers in the industry, allied to the fact that nobody ever – in the history of the world – seems to have experienced even a flicker of lag on any Windows Phone device – you may have thought the BB10 browser to be a tad out of its depth on this occasion. Well, you’d have been quite wrong.
The WebKit-based browser impressed against both the iPhone and the Windows Phone-based device, the latter of which encountered some form of error when loading the as-described “content-heavy” webpage. Perhaps even more impressive, is the fact that the BlackBerry device is little more than a dev kit – i.e it’s not a final BlackBerry 10 smartphone.
We would like to have seen how an Android device – running on the Chrome browser – would have fared in this test, and it seems arbitrary that the most-used mobile OS of them all seems to have been casually omitted from these trials.
Still, BlackBerry 10 will launch on January 30th in New York, and while the current fleet of BlackBerry devices seem dated and out of sync with the rest of the market, BB10 could breathe new life into the flagging brand.
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