It goes without saying that not all Android handsets are created equally. You can pick up a smartphone made by a no brand Chinese vendor for less than $150, or you can import the dual core beast that is the Samsung Galaxy S II for over $700 and have one the fastest mobile phones currently on the planet. Benchmarks have been created to showcase which devices are “the best”, and while that’s useful if you’re the hardcore gaming type, or the kind of person who needs to feel superior to everyone else by sharing an arbitrary number in an online forum, you can’t really tell what real world performance is going to be like … that is until now. Qualcomm has released a benchmark tool called Vellamo, which according to Sy Choudhury, Director of Product management at Qualcomm, was made because of a “lack of industry benchmarks to evaluate mobile Web performance across various areas including memory, scrolling, JavaScript, HTML5, canvas rendering speed and network access.”
How does Vellamo work? You can grab it from the Android Market for free, install it, then run it on any Android device, meaning it doesn’t need to have a Qualcomm processor inside. It’ll run through 11 tests, some of which include the famous SunSpider JavaScript test, and the new V8 Benchmark Suite that was developed by Google, and then it’ll show you a score that you can then use to compare to other devices. Right now the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is the best Android device on the planet according to Vellamo, but if you want to talk purely about smartphones, then that honor goes to the HTC Sensation.
Will you be picking up your next smartphone based on some new benchmark? Doubtful, but a select few of you will. Note that stuff like this is why we recommend you pick up a Nexus device, because Google tends to further optimize their browser with each new release of Android, which almost always shows up first as an over the air update to Nexus handsets.