I don't trust out-of-the-box shoot-outs because most phones I've used has every cpu-wasting feature turned on and I don't know - personally - how to discriminate those shoot outs against reality or what the reviewer was on about.
Out of the box, my Evo was buttery smooth - laggy as my old yellow hound dog but smooth and not near what I enjoy now, but buttery smooth.
As a CDMA owner, I've used iPhones (from company pool or co-workers - including extensively the iP4) while on travel needing that GSM goodness. Maybe if they'd offered a non-AT&T alternative years back, I'd have an iPhone. I always found the overall desktop interface to be too much in my face, but past that, the apps worked great and the Apple browser was the first on a cell phone that I'd ever used that just worked right, in my opinion. Those were, for obvious business reasons - not jailbroken or tuned.
The Droid is an earlier effort and while it allowed people to explore new phone boundaries, I don't consider its comparison relevant today. It's fine for what it is, but an iPhone - like a Samsung Galaxy-class, an HTC Desire-class or the Droid X are more what I'd characterize as superphones - a step above smartphone because of deep memory and user satisfaction with near-laptop utility because of the ability to add productivity apps.
I've already conceded - while hinting at my background as Mach kernel dev among other things - that Apple does many things very, very well (and I did not work for Apple, just for the record).
Here's the foodchain, we all know it -
App running under vendor-specified launcher running under Android OS running within the constraints of a device-specific kernel running on a motherboard containing a lot of important silicon, including the SoC processor that other threads are nutz about.
Apple is not a software company - Apple is a hardware company that makes incredibly good software to showcase and sell their hardware.
Apple completely specified the iPhone hardware and controls its updates to differentiate itself as special in the Market.
The only phone I know that's close to that is the Google Nexus - but it's platform mission isn't to differentiate itself as the better Android - it's always to drive home the point that the Google phone proves to all errant vendors that the basic performance claims and features can be met with an existing popular platform, and therefore (from their POV) light the way for users to expect things without drinking the "but Android is so difficult to implement" Kool-Aide.
Evo and Droid X and Samsung Galaxy-class rooters will all attest (ok - some might attest, I went overboard there) to superior browser performance after installing a custom kernel and tuning things.
If your point is that out of the box and as configured, the iPhone browser has some superior characteristic (whatever it may be) and that's what many people see in the comparison - well - ok.
What I see - for my own beloved Evo, for the Droid X, for the iP4 - is that as consumers, it's us against them - they'll go as far as they have to, then slather the rest with marketing. In Android's case, the various vendors have ROI objectives that in their mind allows compromised performance. I can safely level the same claim against the entire iOS - Android is more like the early Darwin/OS X days in platform potential than Apple is ever allowing iOS to be.
To the topic at hand - browser performance.
You measure by smoothness, I claim to have an out. I also claim with candor that I've no idea how a properly-tuned jailbroken iP4 will perform against my phone. I claim similar smoothness and I know there's no comparison with rendering speed - my older-generation processor with a custom kernel will speed through long forum pages in ways that a stock iP4 only dreams about.
But if the browser is about information, why not attack a real issue, rooted at the app, and not at an unknown lower layer (to whit - is this smoothness of which you speak an app issue, an integration issue or a tuning issue (with underlying s/w components such as the OS, the launcher or the kernel))?
I think the web is about information.
I think that all Android phones are lacking when running this simple test:
The HTML5 test - How well does your browser support HTML5?
My desktop Firefox hits 139 and 4 bonus points. My desktop Safari on SnowLeopard hits 208 with 7 bonus points. My Evo hits 176 and no bonus points. I have Flash so I win, but seriously against the open standard, I score low on html5 rendering of video support.
Tell me the iPhone or Win7 phone wins there and I'll concede victory to those platforms in that important area of information flow from the web.
Tell me that any single, tertiary metric wins on stock, never-used-in-my-experience configurations and I remain confused.
I can't agree that the iPhone4 is superior in that particular way - I can only concede that out of the box, it simply sucks less than the phones in the comparison video (none of which, including the iP4 are showing their true strength).
World of difference between sucking less and getting something right. More so when also considering configuration.
That's my answer as a user.
I went to this trouble of posting for one reason: that any reasonable single user perspective deconstructs any absolutist statements, example given, the claim that people disagreeing with an unconstrained premise are living in denial.
Now - how does that answer shape my original questions to you as a mod?
What's the point of your quest here?
What is it you want to establish or prove - or discover?
