Poor, poor Palm. They didn't get to run up very much hype before the cold truth slapped them hard in the face. The Palm Pre barely had two weeks as king of the mountain before the 3GS came out and blew its sales away. Now we've got another piece of bad news for Palm. A series of load-time tests seems to show rather conclusively that the 3GS is faster than the Palm Pre by a noticeable margin.

These tests, conducted by Anandtech, show the 3GS's domination over the T-Mobile G1, the iPhone 3G, and the Palm Pre. The new iPhone loads websites roughly 11% faster than the Pre, 54% faster than the old 3G iPhone, and about twice as fast as my beloved G1. The 3GS launches applications between 13-42% faster than the 3G, depending on the app. It's also roughly two to four times faster at app launching than the pre. The G1 again comes in last place with everything but Google maps. Boo-yah.

This news should be taken with glee by the hundreds of thousands of new 3GS users. A 54% speed increase in web speed and up to a 42% increase in app launching is huge, and proves that the 3GS is more than just a 'minor update' to the 3G. That ARM Cortex A8 processor in the 3GS is definitely pulling its weight.