After the recent announcements concerning Pocket IE6 and Fennec (Mobile Firefox) it’s clear that WebKit just got some more competition in the mobile browser space. Not too long ago, Web Browsing was a Yes/No field in the phone spec. Today’s wars are fought around features (CSS3/JavaScript/AJAX/Flash) while tomorrow will probably put more emphasis on performance and power consumption.

In the desktop world, Acid Tests are one of more popular ways of measuring the completeness of the rendering engine. While most “real” browsers do just fine with the Acid 2, Acid 3 is still a work in progress. So, when every mobile browser claims to be bringing the “real” web to mobile, how do they actually perform with tests like these?

We did a quick comparison meant to save some time to those wondering about the same thing. Please note, however, that some mobile browsers have special “mobile” rendering modes that improve accessibility of websites and reduce download time. This wrecks havoc on tests like Acid that are focused on pixel-perfect rendering precision (more here). Don’t hold that against them - in the end the real-world browsing experience is what matters most.

In addition to iPhone, Android, Nokia S60 and BlackBerry Bold we picked some new featurephones (LG VU, Samsung Eternity), as well as several popular multi-platform mobile browsers (SkyFire, Opera Mobile, the pre-release Fennec and Opera Mini).

Here is the blueprint…

…and here are the results:

iPhone 3G (WebKit 525)

Android G1 (WebKit 525)

LG VU

Nokia S60 (WebKit 413)

Samsung Eternity

BlackBerry Bold

Opera Mini 4.2 (both Full and Mobile views)

Opera Mobile 8.65 - Mobile View

Opera Mobile 8.65 - Full View

SkyFire 0.85 - Mobile View aka SmartFit

* SkyFire 0.85 Full View and the pre-release Fennec would not render Acid 2.

So there you have it! WebKit really does well here. Apparently Opera 9 Mobile gets a perfect score - but it’s only on Windows Mobile at the moment and we didn’t have any WinMo devices to play with. We wish that the Nokia S60 browser tested had a more recent WebKit build - but there were no updates available for our N82 & N93. SkyFire had some glitches and Fennec did not play nice with Acid 2, but did amazingly well with Acid 3 (better than our desktop browsers!). 2009 will certainly raise the bar up a notch. Stay tuned and keep surfing.