I have a single page phonegap app which makes use of CSS3 styles. Its performance is acceptable on all other devices except Nexus 10. I suspect that it might be related to the higher resolution that Nexus 10 uses.(2560 x 1600 pixels).
As per the benchmark tests (http://www.gsmarena.com/google_nexus_10-review-861p5.php), Nexus 10 falls behind other tablets. So to prove my theory I wanted to see if I can run my application on lower resolution mode on Nexus 10. Is it possible & how to do it? Can I use meta tag viewport with scaling 0.5? will that work?
Assuming the Nexus 10 identifies itself uniquely you should be able to check for it with the Device object in the PhoneGap API.
update
To get the performance change on the Nexus device scaling is not going to do it for you since the same number of pixels are still needing to be calculated - however the target-densityDpi viewport option will hopefully achieve what you require - see this SO Q/A target-densityDpi
On the Nexus 10 the normal resolution is 300 dpi so you would want something like <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, target-densityDpi=150">