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Android Options Mean "Best" Browsers Might Surprise You
An anonymous reader writes with this quote from Tom's Hardware: "Due to Apple's anti-3rd-party browser stance, and Windows RT's IE-only advantage on the 'Desktop,' Android is the only mobile platform where browser competition is thriving. The results are pretty surprising, with the long-time mobile browsers like Dolphin, Maxthon, Sleipnir, and the stock Android browser coming out ahead of desktop favorites like Firefox, Opera, and even Chrome. Dolphin, thanks to its new Jetpack HTML5 engine, soars ahead of the competition."
On mobile the best browser is not the fastest browser. What matters is that it is fast enough while consuming the least power, memory, and bandwidth, having a good resume-and-hibernate behaviour, and not achieve it's abilities by reaching out of its sandbox. A recent study I saw said that Safari had something like half the bandwidth usage as another common browser, as well as lower power usage. things that agressively pre-load pages, spawan zilions of rendering threads and so forth can consume more power for very little extra perfromance. I'm fairly sure these are the reasons Apple limits the browser. They want to assure phone owners get good battery life.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You mean low cost, not cheap.
No, I meant exactly what I said. People buy the phones because they are cheap. And many of those cheap phones are junk with low resolution screens, crappy GPUs, if they even have A-GPS many of them don't even work that great, etc. You need to realize that the vast majority of Android phones being sold are not the Nexus, HTC Ones or Galaxy SII and SIIIs. The vast majority of Android phones are basically only slightly better than feature phones.
Android phones can do everything an iPhone or Windows Phone does, at a lower cost.
Let me guess, you're comparing the unsubsidized price of the newest iPhone to the subsidized price of an Android device. Otherwise, you're full of it. The iPhones don't cost anymore on contract than any comparable Android device. And on the unsubsidized price the difference is usually 10-15% higher for the iPhone. At least in the US, that is.
So it is not cheap, it is a more valuable option for the customer.
No, the "value" was the fact that they got it free or for less than $100 not anything else.
And the reason for that is because the underlying platform is more 'open'
Of which the average consumer neither knows nor cares. I know people who work at Verizon and T-Mobile stores. The people buying the phones overwhelmingly do it for price. That and the fact that the people selling the phones in stores get higher commissions for pushing Android devices usually. Outside of geeks the buyers couldn't care less about Android using Linux, or being open source or that they can root and install custom ROMs. Geeks love to project this as the reason why people buy Android phones overwhelmingly. It is not.