iPhone browser update and benchmarks?

Three weeks ago, MacRumors reported that an iPhone may have been used to visit their site, due to this string found in their logs:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3

MacRumors is now reporting that since then, the browser has undergone some updates, and even has benchmarks for the iPhone’s browser.

In May, we reported that iPhone browser signature has been seen in the wild, including here at MacRumors.com.

It appears the mobile browser has seen ongoing updates since that time, and has since graduated from mobile version “1A538a“ to “1A543a“. Small steady improvements are, of course, expected… but after we discovered this new mobile version, a Google search brings up this cached page where the iPhone was benchmarked using a mobile download benchmarking tool at BroadbandReports.com.

How’d the iPhone do? 157K/second (1262 kbps) to download a 1024 kilobyte file.

If this is to be believed, then it looks like the iPhone will have pretty decent speeds for a mobile device. MacRumors went on to say that the iPhone gave up an apple.com domain, so it might have been connected to Apple’s local WiFi network. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that you will be able to get these kind of speeds from AT&T’s EDGE network.

Read [MacRumors]