Third-Gen iPod touch Benchmarked

At this year’s iPod event, Apple’s SVP of Product Marketing (Phil Schiller) took the stage to reveal that the iPod touch was getting not only twice the storage capacity for an even smaller price, but also that the device was twice as fast, compared with its predecessor.

Pre-installed with the new 3.1.1 firmware, the fresh iPod touch is, indeed, faster, reviewers over at Macworld who ran tests on both the first-generation model, and the newest touch running the latest OS version from Apple claim. An excerpt from the report follows below.

Both devices were tested under OS 3.1.1. Boot was the time it took the iPod to boot to the Home screen. Peggle, HR Battle (Homerun Battle 3D), and Rolando 2 measure app launch times. Web Page was the amount of time it took to load The New York Times Web site (nytimes.com). Sunspider was the time to run the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark. Hand-timed results rounded to the nearest second.

However, the testers added, it wasn’t just in benchmarks where the new iPod won out, but in ordinary tasks as well. “Just as the iPhone 3GS was faster than the iPhone 3G at everything, the new iPod touch feels much faster at any task you throw at it: applications launch (and quit) faster, Web pages load more quickly, processor-intensive games and programs perform better – you name it,” the report pointed out. Macworld promises to carry out further tests on the device to include an even more comprehensive chart in the official review.

This is one of the few times that real-life tests corroborate with Apple’s own benchmarks, with the testers noting that, “In some cases the new touch completed tasks in less than half the time it took the original second-generation model, and in every test the new touch easily bested its predecessor.”