HTML5 on Android Samsung Galaxy Tab "disappointing" vs Apple iPad

Web app developer Sencha has profiled Samsung's Android-based Galaxy Tab in comparison to Apple's iPad, concluding that while it is billed as "the first mass-market Android tablet; unfortunately, it’s a little bit of a disappointment."

Sencha develops JavaScript frameworks to enable developers to create apps--including rich multitouch mobile apps for iOS and Android devices--built from web standards. The company is therefore intently interested in how well new products support HTML5 and its related web standards, including advanced CSS3 transforms, SVG, Canvas animations, Web Sockets, embedded multimedia playback, and overall JavaScript performance.

In its developer scorecard of the Galaxy Tab, Sencha examined how well the new Android tablet performs compared to the iPad across a series of benchmarks including Acid3 (basic web standards), Modernizr (HTML5 feature support) SunSpider (JavaScript performance) and some real world testing.

Acid3 vs Android 2.2: where's the modern Webkit browser?

The Galaxy Tab runs a fairly stock version of Android OS 2.2, scoring 93/100 on Acid3, Sencha reports. This compares to a perfect 100/100 score on the iPad as well as RIM's BackBerry Torch, which Sencha also recently profiled.

Android lost points in Acid3 related to a Media Query test, but most of the points were deducted for failing SVG feature checks, as Android doesn't ship with support for the standard.

In its look at the BlackBerry Torch smartphone, Sencha reported that "Webkit based browsers have been shipping with a score of 100/100 for about a year now, so the result here would tell us how recently the BlackBerry team took their branch of Webkit. And the result is: 100/100. The Torch browser is running a modern Webkit browser."

Modernizr HTML5 features

The second test Sencha reviewed, Modernizr, is a JavaScript library written by Faruk Ates and Paul Irish which profiles compliance with a variety of HTML5 features.

While the Galaxy Tab supports a variety of modern HTML5 features, including localStorage, geolocation, CSS3 styles, Canvas, WebSQL, and drag & drop, it lacks support for features that work on the iPad, including CSS3 3D transforms, SVG, and Web Sockets.

Neither the Tab nor iPad support every component of HTML5, with both lacking support for Web Workers, WebGL, inline SVG and IndexedDB.

SunSpider JavaScript performance

In August, Sencha profiled SunSpider JavaScript scores across three generations of iPhone (3G, 3GS, and 4) running iOS 4.0, along with the BlackBerry Torch 9800 and two versions of Android: a Samsung phone running OS 2.1 and a Nexus One running 2.2 Froyo.

It discovered the Torch offered performance comparable to the iPhone 3GS or Android 2.1, while the Android 2.2 led in performance across the bar, being both good at text processing functions as well as math. In testing the Tab, Sencha reported identical performance, while an iPad running iOS 4.2 reported scores ranging from a few times slower to much slower (in the case of regular expression handling).

Sencha notes, however, that the benchmarks don't tell the whole story because they only test JavaScript performance as it runs on the CPU. "It doesn’t account for the fact that Apple offloads lots of tasks to the GPU for better performance, so a comparison isn’t entirely fair," the company wrote.