Lumia 920 is Nokia’s smartphone running Windows Phone 8 that is getting quite popular these days. When using this phone for browsing the web and running web applications, how does it stack up against its competitors?
First of all, let’s check its browser user agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 920)
Hardly a surprise, it is running the mobile version of Internet Explorer 10. This is good news since it is expected that many web pages out there will be supported just fine. With respect to the new HTML5 features however, it doesn’t seem that many of them are support yet since HTML5Test gives the score of 320, quite behind other competing mobile platforms.
One thing that I did quickly check is the browser’s ability to process lots of data by running a simple pixel crossfader using HTML5 canvas. This simple test exercises the CPU and its collaboration with the rest of the graphic stack. For this test and other subsequent ones, Lumia 920 will be compared against Nexus 4 running Chrome 26 on Android 4.2 and iPhone 5 with iOS 6’s Mobile Safari.
From the outcome, it seems that iPhone 5 is still the king here. While both Lumia 920 and Nexus 4 are powered by Krait (dual-core and quad-core, respectively), there must be another factor in iPhone 5 which makes it extremely fast. Could be the high-performance A6 SoC, or maybe it’s just the tight software hardware integration.
Speaking about performance, what about running JavaScript-intensive applications? We turn to Octane benchmark to find the answer:
Again, the CPU differences certainly contributes to the varying score. It seems however that IE 10’s JavaScript engine (often known as Chakra) is still behind its competitor particularly for this ARM platform.
Last but not least, DOM performance has been always my favorite (check the past performance checks with Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Kindle Fire). I do believe that high-performance DOM access has a profound (positive) impact on the browsing experience. Armed with the collection of DOM core tests from Dromaeo, here is what we got:
Unfortunately, this combination of Lumia 920, Windows Phone 8, and IE 10 doesn’t really deliver the same cutting-edge DOM performance as its immediate market competitors. This might be related to the rather abysmal DOM speed of its desktop cousin, Internet Explorer 10.
What to expect with IE 11 on the next Windows Phone? Better web performance!