[Mark Rejhon]

BlackBerry 8700 series:
JBenchmark2 is a whopping 75
That's 2.5x faster than the former speed champion, 7250.
That's 5x faster than the 7100 series.
That's 10x faster than the 7750, the slowest model.


(Note: I was told by contacts that it was now OK to post this benchmark info since the moratorium on publishing reviews of the new BlackBerry has already been lifted -- and newspapers and magazines, etc are now allowed to publish 8700 reviews, and the carriers have now announced the 8700 already.)

7750: JBenchmark2 ranged from 7 to 8
7100: JBenchmark2 ranged from 14 to 16
7250: JBenchmark2 ranged from 30 to 35
8700: JBenchmark2 ranged from 75 to 76

This is fast enough for video playback, MP3 decoding, 3D videogames, game emulators. This is promising for future multimedia BlackBerry development. Developers should be salivating over this model.

As BlackBerry is a multitasking platform (Alt+Esc switches between applications), it is now fast enough that multitasking data transfers is now pratical - there is no more lag anymore writing emails while loading webpages in the background at full EDGE speeds.

[ptzchris]

well its definite i am buying one when tmo gets it

[jontalotta]

Probably a dumb question, but what the heck -- Can you run the benchmark apps on the PC developer emulator and, if so, has anyone tried it? I am curious what scores you would get.

[rjharary]

Thanks Mark, Wow that is amazing... Didnt seem that fast at the launch, but i wasnt thinking straight that night I just wanted one!

[JRoc]

wow, great stuff, Mark!
but as a benchmarking luddite, wondering if you can explain what JBenchmark2 is and what the numbers actually mean? Also, was the 7250 you were testing running EVDO, or just CDMA?

i'm seriously considering the 8700, but wondering how the browsing stacks up in practical terms to the treo or PPC devices.

thanks,
J.

[thriller]

i wait about a year to upgrade my phone but this looks too tempting. Will the increased speed help the delivery of faster emails.

[Mark Rejhon]

The JBenchmark2 benchmark is based on CPU speed, not download speed.

JBenchmark2 can be downloaded by pointing your BlackBerry Browser at www.jbenchmark.com (Whatever you do, don't download JBenchmark3D -- it crashes certain BlackBerries)

CDMA, EVDO, EDGE, GPRS, makes no difference to JBenchmark2 -- it is strictly a CPU processor benchmark. (Note: There are different kinds of benchmarks for testing download speed)

[JRoc]

ah, i see now.
Thanks!

so, how does this BB CPU benchmark compare to Treo or PPC? i.e. how does the performance of the 8700 stack up? Just curious, as i suspect that even though the 8700 runs a 312 MHz chipset, an apples-to-apples comparison with other devices running at similar clockspeeds can't be made (owing to the customized implementation of the XScale chipset in the 8700).

Cheers,
J.

[Mark Rejhon]

It bears worth noting that 3rd party software on all modern BlackBerry units, runs inside a Java Virtual Machine. This does slows things down somewhat.

For an apples to apples comparision, according to this:
http://www.jbenchmark.com/phonedetai...lmOne+Treo+650
The Treo 650 has a JBenchmark2 score of 155, so the Java Virtual Machine on the Treo units appear to be faster, or the display is faster.

It should be noted that JBenchmark2 scores have been known to improve through BlackBerryOS upgrades, so it's possible that the 8700 is running an unoptimized version of BlackBerryOS and they will optimize it even further. Who knows.

Either way, it is very significantly faster than older BlackBerries, which is a very important detail. (While Treo's have better video and MP3 capabilities, there are several things that BlackBerry does better than Treo -- such as the ability to do true multitasking, which the PalmOS can not yet support. Differences in reliability. Tradeoffs for these different platforms.)

[agep]

I wonder how the 8700 compares to the 7130. From a Bell marketing point of view, they claim the 7130 is faster.

[Mark Rejhon]

Originally Posted by agep

I wonder how the 8700 compares to the 7130. From a Bell marketing point of view, they claim the 7130 is faster.

EVDO is faster than EDGE (real world ~400 Kbps versus real world ~200 Kbps), so naturally this claim would apply.

But, so does the 7250, it supports EVDO with a future software upgrade already being used by in-house carrier representatives (faster data transfer), but has a slower CPU.

So CPU speed and wireless speed can really skew the claims.

BlackBerry Browser is currently CPU limited (about 10-15 Kbps on GPRS devices and about 50 Kbps on the 7250 -- which is less than the 40 Kbps real world speed for GPRS and 100 Kbps real world speed for 1X respectively.) This means that 8700 on EDGE would run BlackBerry browser faster than the 7250 with the EVDO upgrade, because of the CPU limitation (even though the 7250 is much faster, BlackBerry Browser doesn't even always quite keep up with 1X on that model because the browser rendering 'lags' behind the data downloads).

However, if both the 8700 and 7130 has the same CPU and retain the same level of spare CPU headroom during middle of data transfer, the 7130 would most likely be faster in good reception areas.

You may have noticed in some of the review websites that BlackBerry Browser on the 8700 was the fastest mobile web browsing they had ever seen (with graphics heavy sites such as cnn.com loading in 10 seconds or less in good reception areas). So this is good news for you web browser users.

I have no knowledge of the 7130 specs except what is published publicly online, but it does look similiar to the 8700.

[speedsk8berry]

has any one Done a mobile speed test from dsl reposrts the link is http://www.dslreports.com/mspeed my 7290 scores 21kbit/sec to 24kbit/sec 1.8s latancy and 20.41s d/l time on the 50kb test (in an area with only 3 bars) don't use the wap test it oddly no works well atleast not for me. i would be intrested what the score ona 8700c would be.... This test network connection speeds not processor.

[Mark Rejhon]

I installed VeriChat in about 20 seconds. (OTA www.verichat.com/ota/VeriChat.jad starts an approx 330 kilobyte file download). That was about 15 kilobytes per second. I saw bursts to 20 kilobytes per second. That translates to about 150-200 kilobits per second (8 bits per byte, plus a likely 2 bits per byte overhead average).

VeriChat worked fine on the 8700 using the OTA download. Software such as VeriChat that was already designed to automatically size to BlackBerry resolution (240x240, 240x160, 240x260) seemed to automatically size just fine to 320x240.

When I get an 8700r that I can call my own, I'll try YakOn, and see if that one is better.

[richard371]

What about IM+?

[Berry One]

Originally Posted by speedsk8berry

my 7290 scores 21kbit/sec to 24kbit/sec 1.8s latancy and 20.41s d/l time on the 50kb test (in an area with only 3 bars)

7100: 62Kbit/sec, 3.399s latency, 16 sec d/l time on 100kb test.

Sounds too good to be true. Is there bug in test?

[midwest@fan.com]

7520 on Nextel in South Florida:

185 Kbit/sec, 2.283s latency, 6.456s d/l time on 100 kb test

[Mark Rejhon]

The mspeed test result on dslreports don't work accurately with BlackBerry; this is because of BlackBerry's use of a compressing proxy server which distorts the results.

[Berry One]

Test is truly inaccurate for blackberry. Tried to run 600kb test at 6 am on Saturday, received 857 kbit/sec.

This is sort of good news/bad news.
Bad news: the test is not good.
Good news: you would not have to wait for eternity for Web page to download on your blackberry, when that page has heavy graphics.

I would rather have distorted results once than long waits for Web page downloads every time.

[Mark Rejhon]

Originally Posted by Berry One

Test is truly inaccurate for blackberry. Tried to run 600kb test at 6 am on Saturday, received 857 kbit/sec.

It does show how good the compressing proxy is (the BWC, the BIS, and the BES all have web proxy servers that compress a webpage for BlackBerries).

But, it is true that it is not an accurate test of actual wireless data transfer speed.

[Boy Genius]

Mark there is noway real world speeds of EDGE are 200kbps, more like 40-70kbps on Cingular at least..