Right, we all know just how much faster 3G data speeds are in comparison to EDGE speeds. Theoretical speeds are one thing, straight-up throughput numbers are impressive, but what about the most important aspect of any device’s wireless data connection - actual web-browsing performance? Unless you’re one of the harder-core mobile warriors that uses their mobile phone as a wireless modem (tethered to a laptop), chances are your cellphone’s data connection is predominantly used to serve up webpages on your handset’s display. So, just how much faster does a 3G data connection allow you to surf the web? Or, conversely, just how much does the iPhone’s EDGE-only data connection slow down the web-surfing experience? (Hint: not that slow) Well, we set to find out exactly what kind of load-times you can expect in real-world situations and with real-world devices. For this test we used an AT&T Tilt 8925 ( HTC Kaiser TyTn II ) on AT&T’s 3G network, and squared it off against an Apple iPhone on AT&T’s EDGE network. Webpage load-times were the focus of this test, and load-times were rounded down to the nearest second. Load-times were recorded from the moment the page started to load until the status-bar indicated that the page was finished loading (until the progress indicator-bar disappeared). Hit the link for the video. Hypothesis : Webpage load-times are bottlenecked by the device’s processing power and page-rendering technology. This should result in similar load-times between the iPhone and the Tilt. Results : What we found was completely expected. There’s more at play then just throughput. The iPhone’s web-kit based Safari browser allowed it to load pages almost as fast as the AT&T Tilt. We used the Pocket Internet Explorer that comes pre-installed on the Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional-based AT&T Tilt - and it proved to be the device’s downfall. Both devices had similar processor speeds, so...
Filed under: Apple, iPhone, EDGE, HTC, 3G, kaiser, data, research, tytn, time, Cingular/AT&T, speeds, 8925, load, Tilt