Billy Tompson: HP TouchPad gets 'could do better' on HTML5 browser performance

Testing by Sencha finds that TouchPad performance in HTML5 and CSS3 isn't stellar by any means - but things improve as native apps. Surprising?

Sencha, those testers of all things HTML5-ish (and also CSS3-ish), have put the HP TouchPad under the microscope. (A reminder: here's my review, and here's Sencha comparing the iPad 2 to the Motorola Xoom.)

Their conclusion, briefly, when compared to the RIM PlayBook, iPad 2, and Motorola Xoom? Not so amazing on the Acid3 test (which is of course fairly artificial), where it scores 92/100 - principally due to a lack of SVG support in the browser. Fairly good overall. In fact, "good enough" about sums it up.

Some interesting points:

Like all other tablets, the TouchPad and webOS use WebKit as their core browser technology. However what's unique about webOS is the whole operating system is built on web technology, so the entire UI is built using WebKit. The browser reports in its User-Agent string that it's running WebKit version 534.6, which is a very recent build, too. On the hardware side, HP has married that core software platform with a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon dual-core processor. This is an interesting choice of speed, since the Qualcomm data sheet lists the processor at 1.5GHz which implies they've under-clocked the CPU, possibly for reasons of battery life or heat emission.

Fascinating that WebKit is now de rigeur for tablets (and almost overwhelmingly for all new smartphones; we may take a look at what the prospects are like for Opera now that Nokia is throwing Symbian down a deep hole). Who would have thought so all those years ago back in 2003, when Apple announced it was introducing its own Safari browser based on open source technology... which everyone expected would use Mozilla's Gecko? Instead it was WebKit, which is gradually taking over the world.

Back to Sencha:

At 1.2GHz, we expected the JavaScript engine on the TouchPad to be on par with any of the other recent browsers we've tested, so we were a bit surprised when we ran the SunSpider tests and saw the browser fell behind its competitors. The Motorola Xoom, the iPad 2 and the PlayBook are all within about 10% of each other. However, the TouchPad is on average 70% slower in terms of JavaScript execution as measured by SunSpider.

Actually, what looks more surprising in that graph is the performance of the RIM PlayBook, which seems to do far better (shorter bars) than the iPad or Xoom: in my own experience, the PlayBook was horribly slow when it came to rendering a page.

In general, the TouchPad isn't great at CSS3, especially the more demanding versions.

Which means that when Sencha threw the TouchPad into its "kitchen sink" tests...

One of the more interesting things that we found is that while running our Kitchen Sink through the browser, the app had decent speed and decent performance, but we had issues with scrolling and touch events. The browser captured swipes as viewport pan gestures and does not pass them through to the application, so swiping your finger to scroll lists caused the whole window to move. However, when we packaged a Sencha Touch app into an IPK (webOS' packaging format) with the Palm developer tools, and ran the app in a native shell, the overall performance was significantly better, and the swipe gestures were detectable by the application. For now, this remains the most satisfactory way to deploy and run web apps on this device.

In other words, native apps run better than web apps. This is the sort of thing that will crop up again and again, and is staringly obvious in any discussion of "will mobile web or mobile apps win?" The answer is obvious: if what you're offering depends on performance, then an app is always going to be faster, because it has much better access to the silicon. Any web app first has to get over the hump of getting onto the device, and then being rendered, which is always - always - going to impede performance, because the browser has its own issues to deal with. A mobile web app is always going to be an app-within-an-app (performing inside the browser), whereas a native/downloaded app will be there on the device, and so can get more access to CPU cycles.

Sencha's overall conclusion? The TouchPad's browser is "rough around the edges, but there's definitely a lot of potential in the webOS platform, and we look forward to future updates". Pretty much what everyone's been saying, in fact.

? Meantime... someone in HP had a brainstorm, quite possibly after seeing Russell Brand in "Arthur" (the remake of the far better Dudley Moore film). Dudley Moore being unavailable, they decided to go with the same flavour of English-flunky-chamber music and have Russell telling you his most intimate thoughts about how he uses his HP TouchPad.

There's no words we can find that adequately express how we feel about this video. Watch it for yourself. If you can. Warning: does not contain Katy Perry, so keep that expectant look off your face.

Charles Arthur

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