I know, I read the same reviews so I was pleasantly surprised. I even went back to the store a few days later and bought dad his first smart phone for Christmas. It really is quite criminal how slow android is on machines that would have been unimaginably high powered desktops not long ago.

Firefox/gecko has always been great on "underpowered" hardware though. A few years ago I bought an unusably slow android tablet. This thing couldn't play an MP3 without long pauses every 5 seconds. Chrome was absolutely useless but with Firefox it became a half decent web browsing machine.