BB10 – The Battle of the Browsers

RIM recently showcased its latest operating system, the BB10 OS, which promises a richer user experience. With a complete overhaul of the older operating system, the newer BB10 OS definitely feels great to operate due to the BlackBerry Flow user interface the very moment the BB10 awakens. Older BB OS users would definitely know about the sluggish Internet browser they have and the developers at RIM have pronounced the new BB10 browser to be one of the fastest browser compared to any other browser on a mobile platform, or even their desktop counterparts. RIM also states that the new browser offers the best HTML5 support apart from being one of the fastest. 

The Alpha Dev B on the left, the Z10 on the right

To confirm this, we needed to practically do a test ourselves. We received the BB10 test device, the Dev Alpha B, from RIM loaded with the latest BB10 OS. To test the performance of the browser, we ran a few online benchmarks and compared the scores with other mobile browsers based on the Windows, Android and IOS platforms. The tests were conducted on the stock browsers of the Dev Alpha B device running the BB10 OS, the HTC 8X running Windows Phone 8 OS, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus I9250 running Jelly Bean and the iPad 2 running IOS 6.01. In conjunction, we also added test results of Opera Mobile, Chrome and Firefox for the Android platform. Let’s see what we have here.     

Conclusion

Though the BB10 browser did not manage to make it to the top in two of the tests, the overall scores reveal that it is definitely the fastest browser out there. Do note that the scores were derived from the alpha test device running the BlackBerry 10 OS. The final product – the BlackBerry Z10 – will be launched only by the end of January 2013. The scores on the Z10 might be higher than what we got now, but it is difficult to confirm it at this stage. Do stay tuned to tech2.com as we shall receive the Z10 very shortly. Watch out this space for the review and videos of the BlackBerry Z10.