Chrome vs stock Android Browser

Since I’ve recently installed Android ICS on the Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman, I’ve been able to install the Google Chrome mobile web browser that’s available in the Google Play store.

Chrome brought the fast V8 javascript engine to the Android platform, so it’s supposed to be much faster handling benchmarks like the SunSpider test.

As I wrote in the previous blog post, the Android ICS stock browser did it in 3099.8 ms, which was an improvement over the Gingerbread stock browser.

I’ve now run the same benchmark in Chrome.

As you can see above the test was completed in 2886.9 ms. Although there’s a definite improvement over the stock browser, the 200 ms advantage is not as big as I thought it would be.

I believe Chrome will eventually replace the current browser and become the default one in future versions of Android.

Sony Ericsson Live with Walkman performance with Android ICS

Sony Ericsson promised that all the 2011 Xperia line along with the Live with Walkman model would get updated to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

They took their time and the carriers also took an extra time before releasing the firmware to the carrier-locked devices. Recently I was finally able to go through the ICS update process with the Live with Walkman I’ve posted a short hands-on a while ago.

The update process is pretty straight forward as long as you know how to use a computer, since Sony Ericsson (now only Sony without the Ericsson part) demands the user to connect the phone to the PC Companion Windows software or to the Bridge for Mac app in order to get Android 4.0. Apparently the update it too big to be handled as a simple OTA (over the air) update!

Sony also warns on their website that Android 4.0 is heavier than the older 2.x versions and that might have a negative impact on how the smartphone performs.

I’ve installed the official Android 4.0.4 update and ran the Quadrant benchmark to check if the update had any impact on the performance figures.

The score is, as the manufacturer warned, lower than before: 1381 is indeed not as good as the score Android Gingerbread achieved, around eighteen hundred points.

I’ve run the test twice to see if there was any improvement in the second run but, as you can see below, it just got a little bit worst, achieving 1362 points: disappointing!

I also ran the SunSpider web-browser javascript benchmark and fortunately, unlike the Quadrand score, the results improved as you can see below.

Now the test is completed in 3099.8 ms which is better than the old result (3342.7 ms)!

Overall, and despite the bugs and the performance hit, I do recommend updating because newer apps require Android 4.0 ICS to run, like Google’s own Chrome web browser!

Samsung Galaxy S will not be updated to Android ICS

I’ve just read that Samsung officially confirmed it won’t update their 2010 flagship Android smartphone to the latest version of Android that was announced by Google a couple of months ago.

Although the i9000 was announced in March, it was first released in June of 2010 but only in a limited number of markets. For instance, in the country where I currently live in, Vodafone only launched it in late October of the same year.

This means a lot of people bought this phone, often attached to a 24-month contract, in late 2010, being currently within the first year of ownership.

Since Samsung will not continue to provide further support, most of these people will have to wait another year with a flagship phone running an older version of Android until they can renew their contracts and get another phone (probably not from Samsung again!).

This goes against the 18-month update commitment Google said they were trying to push along with their partners and makes me wonder if it’s really worth to buy an expensive high-end Samsung Android device, given their poor track record of updates.

On the other hand I do really understand why Samsung made this decision: their core business is to sell new smartphones!

Samsung probably guessed that most of the, let’s say 15 million, Galaxy S customers don’t really care or know what version of Android they are currently running, and the few that do really care about this are probably savvy enough to visit the XDA forum and sort this out unofficially with the community.

As I recently wrote, I sold my Galaxy S for a bunch of other reasons some weeks ago. If there was any doubt remaining in my head about if selling it was the right thing to do, after reading this disappointing news, I’m really glad now that I did, since this would be the ultimate “nail in the coffin”.

Merry Christmas!

Is Android ICS going to support Flash?

Adobe announced it’s going to halt the development of Flash for mobile platforms.

Adobe’s Danny Winokur wrote “We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.”

I don’t know if I understood correctly the sentence above but in my understanding it is apparently said that upcoming new mobile OS versions (such as Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich) won’t have Adobe’s Flash Player!

I believe this might be huge news and most tech news websites didn’t exactly emphasized this!

Full Flash support was one major feature of Android Froyo (and Gingerbread), was used several times for marketing purposes and as a selling point when compared against iOS and Windows Phone amongst others!

Maybe I misunderstood Adobe’s announcement and it will in fact be possible to install Flash 11.1 on Android 4 ICS because if it’s not, in my opinion, it will be a big disappointment for a lot of Android users that are eagerly waiting to buy the next Nexus phone.

I think the lack of Flash might in fact have an effect on how Android products are compared to the competition. This might make some customers that were in the past looking for a Flash-capable Android, look for an iPhone or those new Nokia Lumia because the Flash argument is now simply gone!