It's pretty straightforward to observe how iPhone's Safari is accelerated while Androids is not by using CSS 3D transforms. Google's original 2D layer (Skia) c

It's pretty straightforward to observe how iPhone's Safari is accelerated while Androids is not by using CSS 3D transforms. Google's original 2D layer (Skia) can only render affine transforms and not perspective transforms in webkit (largely because it just hasn't been configured in WebCore). Mobile Safari can in fact render perspective transforms indicating that it is using a different graphics engine than Skia (in fact Apple's documentation says that it is hardware accelerated). While this is only concerning the browser it allows for some benchmarks - try any transitions or 3D transforms in the browser and you'll find them much faster on the iPhone. Additionally Skia, which is used in Android's browser is used elsewhere in Android as well so its performance characteristics are more broadly relevant beyond just web browsing.