Marlin Mobile Android Phone Benchmark: HTC Thunderbolt is the fastest Android phone, but not by much

Posted on 16 April 2011 by Adrian Mendoza

Key findings

• The fastest Android handset on the market is the HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon.
• The Bottom 5 phones are five to eight times slower than the Top 5 phones.
• The slowest phones are sold largely by T-Mobile and Sprint.

Marlin Mobile’s latest quarterly benchmark shows that the HTC Thunderbolt by Verizon is the fastest Android phone. However, Verizon’s first 4G LTE phone – the highly touted Thunderbolt – is really only a hair faster than its current 3G and 4G competitors. The hype surrounding the Thunderbolt is marketing driven, rather than by actual performance metrics considering the realities of Verizon’s 4G network coverage.

What does all this really mean for user experience?

On the positive side, consumers are finally seeing phones that can come close to their user’s expectations for a web experience of reasonable quality. But as more and more high- end devices emerge, user expectations will continue to climb. The baseline will become a more interactive, engaging, and rich mobile web experience, compared to the “stripped down” mobile web experience users tolerated previously on more primitive phones. Compared to the previous Marlin Mobile benchmark we see much more parity in performance among the Top 5 phones, and we expect that to continue.

On the negative side, carriers are still distributing low-end devices that are hurting both the mobile web experience and consumer confidence. With devices that are five to eight times slower than the leading devices on the market, many customers are suffering from an unnecessarily poor user experience. The Marlin Mobile benchmark displays poor devices still generate mediocre  user experiences on the mobile web, even if those devices are running on LTE or 4G networks.

Marlin Mobile’s Benchmark measured the speed of Android phones using the Marlin Mobile test network. That network leveraged more than 500 phones distributed across 7 states. The Benchmark measured the performance of different Android devices accessing content on the mobile website of a leading content publisher.

What’s the fastest Android tablet on the market today? Tune in next week for the answer!