iDownloadblog Compared Apple’s iPad 2 And Amazon’s Kindle Fire

After Amazon put its Kindle Fire on sale, one question arose: Which tablet is faster, iPad or Kindle Fire? Wanting to figure it out, iDownloadblog compared the two devices with each other.

The comparison is not completely fair as Amazon included cheaper internal components in its tablet, which is the main factor of its low $199 price point. A teardown done by iFixit reveals OMAP 4430 chip from Texas Instruments inside the tablet, which is also found in PlayBook tablet from Research In Motion.

The comparison has shown that iPad 2 boots considerably faster than Kindle Fire, which is again due to its optimized software and dual-core processor. As for browsing the web, there is no surprise that iPad 2’s Safari performed much faster than Silk browser in Kindle Fire, which offloads rendering of pages to the Amazon cloud. However, it should be noted that in this test Amazon’s tablet was loading Flash data, which is not supported on iPad.

The graphics unit in iPad 2 which is nine times faster compared to previous iPad provides smooth scrolling, which is usually pretty choppy on the Amazon’s device. However, Kindle Fire offers smoother Netflix streaming than iPad 2, probably due to the updated version of their client for Android which is not yet released for Apple’s platform.

This is not the most thorough test of these devices, and as 9to5Google noted, Kindle Fire and iPad 2 cannot be really compared with each other as they are entirely different devices.