New Web browser file download benchmarks, incl. Adisasta WM Download Accelerator 2.0

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Some days ago, I promised I would benchmark the brand new Adisasta WinMobile Download Accelerator (wmDA), version 1.x of which I’ve thoroughly benchmarked in The definitive guide to downloading files, images and saving Web pages with Pocket PC-based Web Browsers. As I’ll keep a W3C session in a week, I found it necessary to test it – along with all the other, current (!) Windows Mobile-compatible Web browsers like the current NetFront 3.5 TP, Opera Mobile 9.33 beta, Opera Mini 4.1 beta. I also took the chance to compare it to the, so far best downloader tool, HandyGet.

I’ve tested everything on a Dell Axim x51v running makuu’s makuu A06 privß06p WM6.1, using exactly the same card and Internet connection so that there aren’t any differences. Please consult the above-mentioned Definitive guide to downloading files, images and saving Web pages with Pocket PC-based Web Browsers for the meaning of the results. For the card, I used a very fast (as far as file creation and random block writing is concerned) Ridata 256M CF card.

To summarize:

- Opera Mobile 9.33 (and, therefore, the forthcoming 9.5) is much better than 8.65 in both speed (there is a certainly visible download speed increase) and in that it no longer stops when the internal memory fills up when you download files to cards that are too big to be stored in the internal storage (which is used for temporary cache).

- Opera Mini 4.1 beta is tolerably fast – pretty good results for a Java program. Note that you may still want to prefer downloading in the external, native browser - at least under Windows Mobile – because, as can clearly be seen, even Internet Explorer Mobile is far faster.

- HandyGet 1.6 is VERY fast when downloading to cards (but not when doing the same to the internal memory) – with the default settings. Note that, by default, it doesn’t monitor IE; this must be separately configured in File / Setting / General / IE Monitor.

- NetFront 3.5 is pretty fast – about the same speed as IEM when downloading to cards and much faster when downloading to internal memory

- Finally, wmDA has indeed been HUGELY optimized. Now, it’s FAR faster than the 1.x series when downloading to cards – and no longer needs to relocate the cache to the card when there’s little internal memory. Actually, it’s equally fast than HandyGet 1.6 when downloading to a card and much faster than anything else. Even Opera Mobile 9.33 (the fastest standalone browser) is almost two times slower than wmDA.

Note that wmDA has not only been made much faster, but its GUI has also been hugely enhanced. For example, on VGA devices, it no longer uses ugly pixel doubling and ClearType. On the contrary: it has beautifully-drawn, high-res icons on them. It even has some goodies like assigning simultaneous downloading from several mirrors, should you want to download several hundreds of Megabytes or even gigabytes. It also has a built-in scheduler to do the (timely) transfers, for example, in the night. It’s also capable of downloading from FTP sites (not only HTTP ones) but, as with the previous version, it doesn’t have an FTP server browser. Note that the new version is WM5+ only.

Verdict: the new wmDA version is far superior (among other things, far faster) to the old one. Highly recommended if you have HUGE files to transfer!