Now that the iPad is actually in the hands of folks who can tear it down and run it through its paces, it appears the device is actually twice as fast as the already speedy iPhone 3GS -- despite having similar specs.

AppleInsider is reporting that Twitterific developer Craig Hockenberry ran some tests over the Easter weekend, comparing the performance of his new iPad running OS 3.2 and a stock iPhone 3GS running OS 3.0. The results surprised him, with the iPad coming in between 1.5 and 3.9 times the speed of the handset.

“On average, the iPad is about twice as fast as the iPhone 3GS when executiving native (Cocoa Touch) applications,” Hockenberry reports. “Great news for developers, because it gives us much more flexibility when creating our apps.”

Raw speed isn’t the only improvement -- JavaScript performance also got a boost, with 1.2 to 2.4 times the speed. When compared to the original iPhone running OS 2.0, the iPad’s speed was a blistering 12 to 8,750 times as fast in the same tests.

So what can we attribute the speed increase to? The iPad appears to be using the same single core, Cortex A8 ARM processor core and the same Power VR SGX 535 graphics core as the iPhone 3GS, not to mention the same amount of system RAM.

David Carey, vice president of technical intelligence at UBM TechInsights, thinks the answer is that “the DRAMs used in the iPad read and write data in 64-bit chunks.”

In a Wall Street Journal report on the same subject, Carey proclaims, “That helps it move a lot of data a lot faster. You are getting two to three times as many bits as would be characteristic in such products.”

Of course, Apple’s custom A4 silicon can’t be discounted in the equation -- the company has learned a thing or two about designing and optimizing such things since the original iPhone.