HTC HD2 vs iPhone 3GS – browsing
November 9th, 2009 | 
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HDblog.it have published another of their well-produced videos, this time showing the HTC HD2 vs the iPhone 3GS in terms of device size and browsing experience.
They note the experience is mixed, with some sites considerably faster, and some again slower. It is however clear that the screen is much more expansive than the iPhone 3G, and with its accompanied higher resolution should allow without as much zooming in as the iPhone 3GS.
Read more at HDblog.it here.
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The iPhone (with an A8 Cortex 600MHz processor) can clearly seen to be smoother than the HD2 (with an A8 Cortex 1GHz processor). Not HTC's fault- MS, again
Still much rather get a HD2, for the record.
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In the video, the 3GS loaded every site faster (including CrunchGear at the end– see the loading bars on each phone), so not sure where the "some faster, some slower" is coming from. In the video, you can also see that Opera Mobile's zoom isn't working properly on Engadget (even when he tries to zoom out, it doesn't show the whole site in the screen-width).
Despite the HD2 being more responsive than pre-Snapdragon WM phones, the 3GS' scrolling is still smoother. The HD2 initially appears to rotate the screen as fast as, or quicker than, the iPhone, but there's a big difference, which is that Mobile Safari maintains the content zoom level when rotating (which means rotate + zoom) and animates the screen while at it, whereas Opera Mobile just flips and fills the screen.
Opera Mobile is also still missing something quite important, which is content-aware zoom. When you double-tap on a website element in Mobile Safari, it zooms in to just the right level to see whatever you tapped on (e.g. a column of text). Double-tapping in Opera Mobile still just zooms into some arbitrary level, so you have to manually zoom in for each element.
The one advantage the HD2 has is its higher resolution, but I'm not convinced it actually makes as a much of a difference as one might imagine at first. On Wifi, even a first-gen iPhone offers a more comfortable browsing experience than my TP2, for example. Partially it's because of the crappy resistive touchscreen that's not as sensitive to small inputs (e.g. I can tap on a tiny textbox on the iPhone and it'll instantly select it, whereas the TP2 requires zooming into it until it's huge and then tapping it, and waiting a few seconds until it catches up), but it's also other little things about how the two operate. That said, the HD2 is indeed a lot closer to the iPhone-standard of web browsing than the TP2.
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