For a while now we've been keeping track of mobile browser performance using two relatively popular JavaScript heavy benchmarks that are a regular fixation in our smartphone reviews. If you've read any of those reviews, you should immediately be able to name them - SunSpider and RightWare's BrowserMark. Tracking JavaScript performance thus far has helped us codify and track SoC performance, but really understanding and quantifying overall browsing smoothness has remained a more challenging task.

Real web browsing performance is a unique combination of system performance, the Android browser itself, and what contributions or customizations (if any) the OEM has made in the shipping software build. Qualcomm's Innovation Center recently made public a tool for gauging overall browser performance that it's used for a while both in house and in collaboration with OEMs that is geared at present to Android. We've used a subtest from it it a few times, and it's named Vellamo. Read on for more about Vellamo.

The road to our Galaxy S2 review has been a long one. The first time we saw the device was at Mobile World Congress, where it was initially announced. There, Anand and myself played with and hurriedly benchmarked one and came away more than a bit disappointed with performance. I set my expectations based on our initial experience and came away from the conference prepared to be underwhelmed when the device launched internationally and stateside. There was never any doubt in my mind that the device would be a runaway success just like the first one, but I still came away disappointed.

Boy was I wrong. The device that launched internationally is completely different, in the positive sense.

It took a long time for us to get an international Galaxy S 2 in our hands, but we finally got one, and for the past few weeks I’ve been using it as my primary device here in the US on AT&T. It’s not an exaggeration at all to say that we’ve received more requests for a Samsung Galaxy S 2 (henceforth SGS2) review than any other smartphone, by at least an order of magnitude. The tomes of information already writ about this phone has made it all the more daunting to dive head-first into a comprehensive exploration of the phone, and we’ve tried to do our best. Read on for our full review.

There's a lot of speculation about the SoC used in Samsung's Galaxy S II, thankfully through process of elimination and some snooping around we've been able to figure it out - and run some preliminary performance tests.

Read on to see how it stacks up against the latest NVIDIA Tegra 2 based smartphones.