You may be wondering what’s all the big deal about mobile browsers, but let me tell you that the mobile browser is one of the most important part of a smartphone. For one, the very concept of having a smartphone is to be in touch with the world and we need to access the web for that and that comes by via a browser. The hardware limitations imposed by the form factor of a smartphone  is another roadblock in accessing web pages on smartphones which now come in screen sizes ranging 3″-4″ . Add 3G and Wi-Fi data reception hiccups to that and you know how  many hurdles there are in bringing web browsing to the mobile platforms. But developers worldwide have been working on this for long and I must say they have come a long way for we can now access almost every feature available on a desktop browser on the Maemo browser on N900. But I also wanted to know how it measures up to the competition and hence the test and today I will give my verdict.

We did see some blood on the battle field yesterday  and am now pitching them in a YouTube  round to find out which browser packs the  strongest punch. Which browser would you bet on? Safari? Maemo? Android?. I am afraid you will have to hit on the read button to see if you got it right?

YouTube Performance Test

Adobe’s Flash needs no introduction to anyone who spends a decent amount of time on the web these days. However, this very flash support is absent on some of the most popular mobile browsers today: Safari, Opera Mini, Android to name a few. However, HTC has its version of flash compatible browser in its Hero and N900 as we know comes with full flash support (by full flash support we mean the same version of flash that we use on our desktops). Now that we have ironed out the basics of browser capabilities, let’s see how they perform in our test

Round 1: iPhone- YouTube app, G1-YouTube app, Hero-Mobile version of YouTube, N900-Desktop version of YouTube

Ew, this is something I didn’t expect from the N900 browser, especially after acing the speedtest yesterday. On a second thought, I should highlight that YouTube apps on iPhone and G1 are not browsers, so strictly speaking I shouldn’t comparing them with Hero and N900. Now, coming to Hero it no doubt performs better than N900 for the maemo browser has to load the desktop version of YouTube while the Hero is loading the lighter (data consumption wise) mobile version.

Round 2: iPhone- YouTube app, G1-YouTube app, Hero-Mobile version of YouTube, N900-Mobile version of YouTube

To zero in on a winner, I will now compare YouTube streaming speed for the mobile version of YouTube on both Hero and N900. iPhone and G1’s YouTube apps are also included in the test just for a comparison but it is not really fair to compare them with the browsers.

What was that? The N900 was nowhere in the picture when the Hero started streaming! Also, the resolution of the video on Hero was much better than that on the N900. Seems like Google have optimized their android browser to get the best out of YouTube. Even the YouTube app on G1 fares better than the one on iPhone.

So, who really takes the honours here? Based on the tests that I carried out, I will have to say the winner is HTC flash enabled browser of the Hero. It supports flash (mobile version) and it loads webpages and flash content faster than the maemo browser. What does this say about N900 browser? It’s not really as bad as the tests I performed might suggest for the maemo browser is loaded with full flash, which may take a while to load but it lets you do everything that you can do on a desktop browser (well, almost). So what should you go for? Well, depends on your usage, if you are someone who just likes to read content from the web on their mobile phones, I would suggest the HTC Hero but if you are a heavy internet user, you should go for the N900 for it will allow you to do everything that you can do on your desktop browser. Be it blogging, or playing Farm Frenzy on facebook, the N900 browser lets you do everything you want to but its just not optimized for mobile usage yet but give it sometime and am sure the updates will make it a much faster browser than what it is today.