There is this test call the Acid3 Test, and it is designed to test a web browser’s compliance with web standards, with an emphasis placed on Document Object Model and JavaScript. For an operating system based on web standards, you might think that webOS would have been scoring fairly highly with the test from day one. Not so, it would seem. In the early days of webOS, the browser scored a pitiful 1/100. With the update to webOS 1.3.1, the browser scored a 73/100 – better, but still not great.

Now, with webOS 1.4 out and about, the browser’s standards compliance has taken another step forward, scoring a 92/100. Obviously, that’s a great step forward as far as the browser is concerned, and we have been receiving reports of better performance and rendering on all manner of sites as a result. The score also vaults the webOS browser (seriously, it needs a name) to the upper tier of mobile browser compliance, topped only by Mobile Safari (100/100), Opera Mini (98/100), Firefox on Maemo (94/100), and Android’s browser (93/100). Of note, Safari and Android are both powered by the same WebKit core that hums underneath the webOS browser (and webOS as an OS), so full standards compliance is a possibility. At the very least, the score is worlds better than before and far ahead of Internet Explorer (Mobile: 5/100, Desktop: 32/100). For 99.999999% of users a score of 92/100 is going to be more than good enough for their browsing experience.

jack87 in our forums also notes that several sites (like costco.com) that previously failed out on webOS are now working. How about you, seeing better rendering now that you’re all 1.4′d up?

EDIT: Anchors (links that lead to a specific point on a page, e.g. comments) work now too! This blogger = happy camper.

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Most of us like watching movies, and the Sprint TV, although helpful, does not cut it for those who want more. But according to the New York Times, we Pre owners are about to get a chance to rent movies right on our handsets.

According to NYTimes, mSpot, a five-year-old mobile entertainment company based in Palo [...]

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You can still bring up the menu on the Palm Pre while in landscape mode.  You may have noticed that when you put the Palm Pre into landscape mode in the browser or in email (after applying the Palm Pre Landscape mode email trick), the menubar on the top of the Pre disappears.  Good news: it’s still there, you just can’t see it.

Rdaex in our forums was amongst several PreCentral.net members to discover the trick. Just hit one of the volume buttons and the Pre will not only show the volume indicator at right, but at left the menubar will re-appear and you can tap the Menu to bring it up.

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We’re going to kick off the Palm Pre vs. iPhone 3G S excitement with a simple browser smackdown.  The short version: the iPhone 3G S is faster in our video above, but the Pre is close and actually is edging out the iPhone after the just-applied 1.03 webOS update.  The part you actually should pay attention to is "time to content," i.e. how long it takes to load up the stuff you actually want to read as opposed to the javascripty-bits. Bottom line: speed-wise there’s a hair’s-breadth between the two browsers, it’s so close that you really ought not be making your purchase decision based on it — or bragging about it either way.

Feature-wise, we give the edge to the iPhone 3G S — they are on version 3.0 while the Pre is just getting started at 1.02 / 1.03.  The ability to pop up a link in a new browser window is quite nice — not to mention Autofill.  I myself prefer the Pre’s Card metaphor to the in-app tabs of Safari, but that ’s a matter of taste.

Stay tuned for more as we pit these devices against each other!

[cross-posted at The iPhone Blog, where you’ll find a raft of iPhone 3G S coverage!

Update: As noted in the comments and in a raft of emails, you can open links in a new card on the Pre with Opt + Space + Tap.  It works, but Palm, really, Opt + Tap isn’t really doing anything here.  Just saying. Thanks everybody!

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Yeah, we’re jealous. There’s no use hiding it. Boy Genius Report broke just yesterday that they had a Palm Pre and now they’ve come out with the review: they like it.

Unfortunately, it looks as if the ROM on the device isn’t complete — the music app wasn’t working for them, among other things.

Still, overall the story here is a good one, BGR concludes:

“The OS is great. There’s no ifs ands or buts; it’s really refreshing to see something that’s brand new with a UI unlike anything else out there. [...] their hardware has always been second rate at best and it doesn’t seem to be changing now. Couple that with the nation’s underdog carrier at a $299 price-point (before rebate), and we’re not sure how many people are going to be lined up overnight, yet we’re pretty confident once people are able to play a real unit themselves, there will be more than a lot of happy Palm Pre customers.”

On top of all that, we learned that the screen is awesome, second only to the iPhone (which has the advantage of a glass overlay).  The keyboard, not so awesome.  Neither is the build or material quality of the phone itself. The feeling is described as “a little cheap” and apparently the slider mechanism occasionally would catch on itself when closing.

More or less, Boy Genius Report likes their (not quite fully baked) Palm Pre. It’s not a perfect device – no single phone is, but it is a worthy contender in the increasingly crowded smartphone market. And you can have your own in just over a week!

Thanks to everybody that sent this in!

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The big question (one of them) surrounding the Palm Pre is just how good is the browser? We know it’s based off the same open-source WebKit engine as the iPhone’s Safari browser, but the robustness of its features has been up in the air for, well, five months now. Thanks to Darth Pooh in our forums and his magical Pre access, we can note that the Pre’s browser is fairly robust, as it can handle both Google Docs (spreadsheet) and Reader, as seen above. They are the iPhone versions of the sites, but that’s not a bad thing by any measure.

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Xenophonite in our forums engaged in one of our favorite pre-phone-launch activities for any phone: checking out DSL Reports Mobile Speed Test results and looking for browsers attached to unreleased phones.  To wit: the Palm Pre.  The results: fast.

• 1728 0.157s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
• 1685 0.188s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
• 533 0.125s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
• 550 0.117s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
• 711 0.134s (400k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
• 1391 0.14s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0

In plain English, this means you’re looking at download speeds of between 500k and 1700k – which is mighty fast.  Faster, we think, than most people are managing on iPhones.

Just as important as speed is latency.  Speed is how fast your data comes down, Latency is how long it takes to get your connection going in the first place.  Latency is notoriously bad on mobile networks, but it’s darn good on Sprint’s EVDO network – coming in reliably under .2 seconds, while an iPhone’s latency on AT&T’s over-stretched network often is longer than a second.

Add in the Pre’s lightning fast rendering time and you can expect that your browsing experience on the Pre will be a joy.  Maybe, just maybe, it really will be 4 times faster than the iPhone.

Thanks xenophonite!

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TheInvisibleMan of PalmPreForum.org has posted up a series of videos of the Palm Pre Emulator.  Obviously not everything here is going to work exactly as it will on the Pre, ex. the emulator doesn’t support multitouch while the Pre itself does.  Still and all, if you’re looking to get your weekend Palm Pre video fix on, this is a good place to start.

Thanks to Mark for the tip!

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So, remember last Friday when Dieter posted up the Roger McNamee "smack talk" post?  McNamee had done an interview with Bloomberg and was talking about Apple’s products, mentioning that he loves Apple and wouldn’t use any other computer, and said that he had an iPhone, an iPod Touch and lots of other iPods. Then McNamee said:

"They make great products. For media, they’re fantastic, but our product, the Palm Pre, and again, I’m a board member of Palm, we’re a huge investor in the company, so people understand the conflicts here. But, our product’s just gonna run rings around them on the web. I mean, if you want to go to the web, it’s going to be a million times, well not a million times; It’s going to be several times faster, and that’s a huge deal from us."

Then on Monday, Palm filed for Clarifications and Corrections on some of the stuff that McNamee had said during the interview. Number 5 on the list of clarifications and corrections is in regard to the "running rings around them" statement:

"With respect to the statements in the tenth paragraph of the transcript that the Palm Pre is “going to be a million times – well, not a million times – several times faster” than Apple, Inc.’s iPhone products and is “going to run rings around them on the web,” the Palm Pre is still under development and it is premature to state the speed at which the device accesses the web or the relative speed of the Palm Pre compared to the smartphone products of competitors."

Today, Dieter was kind enough to cover the Palm Pre Webcast live via Cover It Live. We didn’t really get any "new" news on the Pre except for learning a little more about the plans required for the Pre. Plus Dieter reported on "How Many Cards is Too Many?" to have open on the Pre. There was a little confusion during the webcast when Matt Crowley mentioned something about "Anything more than 4 or 5 cards becomes unwieldy." Dieter sets us at ease about that comment.

But, back to the speed of the Web on the Pre. Is it faster than the Safari browser on the iPhone? Well, Kevin Tofel from jkOnTheRun was present at the Pre Webinar also, and he noticed how fast the browser was when Matt Crowley did a search on Google for Big12,  the conference basketball site www.big12sports.com, which is a pretty intensive site best suited for a powerful desktop browser. Kevin assumes that Crowley was using Wi-Fi, and he went to the same Big12 site on his iPhone to compare the speed. Kevin said that the Pre had fully rendered the complex site in about 8 seconds, and the same site on his iPhone took about 30 seconds. You can watch the sequence from the Webinar video that Kevin is talking about here.

Kevin notes that he doesn’t know if the Palm Pre Webkit browser caches web pages from prior usage, but even it was it’s still a tick in the Pre’s advantage over the iPhone (whose caching is sub-par).  Kevin also mentions the fact that the Pre has the TI OMAP3 processor and Apple uses a different ARM solution from Samsung.  Great job at catching one of the little things in the webcast, Kevin!

So, was Roger McNamee correct when he said, "our product’s just gonna run rings around them on the web" or were we looking at some made-for-demo speed?

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As well as the various details Palm shared with us in our Pre meeting earlier this week, we also shot a huge video demo of the smartphone in action.  That’s finally uploaded and processed, and so we think you’ll be as excited as we are at the prospect of a 26 minute video demo of [...]

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