3G iPhone vs EDGE iPhone Speed Comparison

[MacRumors]

Applicando published an interesting speed comparison video comparing the iPhone's EDGE download speeds and a mimicked 3G iPhone.

In the comparison video two iPhones load the same web page side-by-side. The 3G iPhone is demonstrated using a Wifi connection sharing the internet connection of an iMac which was connected to the internet via HSDPA (Huawei E172 HSPDA modem).

Video Link

In the end the "3G iPhone" downloads the page almost twice as fast.




Article Link

[danielsan26]

Probably not an entirely fair comparison, since the iphone is sharing the imac's 3G connection, it means the imac was probably connected to the 3G network already, whereas the 2.5G iphone had to join the data network then load the page.

A more fair comparison would have been connecting the imac to the 3G network *then* loading the page and comparing the times.

[macduke]

Originally Posted by danielsan26

Probably not an entirely fair comparison, since the iphone is sharing the imac's 3G connection, it means the imac was probably connected to the 3G network already, whereas the 2.5G iphone had to join the data network then load the page.

A more fair comparison would have been connecting the imac to the 3G network *then* loading the page and comparing the times.

Not necessarily. The iMac has the ability to render pages much quicker than the iPhone. There were a lot of images and ads to place in that page. I doubt it would be entirely possible to come up with an accurate result anyway. Depending on signal strength, what city they are in, what type of chip ends up in the 3g iPhone, the processing power of the 3g iPhone, and the physical distance to the server the webpage was stored on can all be factors. For instance, when I'm at home in the east side of Kansas City, my Edge speeds seem to be fairly good. When I go over to the west side of KC where my girlfriend lives, the Edge speeds are easily 50% faster. When I'm at school in Springfield, MO, the speeds are about 25-50% slower then my base speeds on the east side of KC. Given the variations in the same technology, and all the various 3g chips and specs, cell phone tower quality and density, and the web pages you typically visit, everyone will have a different experience. We won't really be able to tell until we get a baseline score from thousands of people using the final version, but its still kinda neat to see what we can look forward to, even though my college town doesn't have 3g. I just wish the new iPhone is compatible with my school's wifi network. Then I won't ever have to worry about 3g! And the annoying connect to wifi popups will go away since there is coverage everywhere.

[craigverse]

Time will tell.

[DB2k]

Originally Posted by danielsan26

A more fair comparison would have been connecting the imac to the 3G network *then* loading the page and comparing the times.

If the 3G iPhone doesn't have an always on PDP context then that will truely be ****.

[boeingair]

Originally Posted by macduke

The iMac has the ability to render pages much quicker than the iPhone.

This is completely irrelevant. The iMac just serves as a conduit to connect the iPhone to the 3G network and is not rendering or processing the data that is coming down in any way.

[bmb012]

The biggest problem I have with EDGE is that it takes so long for it to make a connection. Checking my email takes much longer on EDGE than WiFi, but loading a page, once it starts loading, isn't all that much slower...

[raggedjimmi]

Anything that shaves time off loading is fine by me. Hurry up 3G.

[MarkW19]

I think Apple should also work on increasing the iPhone's rendering speed of webpages - on wifi, with my MacBook and iPhone next to eachother on my wifi network, my MacBook is so much faster than my iPhone generally, even on just simple mainly-text sites.

As well as just shifting to newer/different technologies/network types, they should really concentrate on the speed of the device itself.

This relates to other apps for me as well - I really wish the whole thing was a lot snappier and more instant, without the little delays all over the place (SMS, Calendar, Safari etc.)...

[ventro]

Well with the rumors of Apple to switching to the brand new ARM processor floating about, maybe they are killing two birds with the 3G iphone.

[Willis]

*starts chant*

3G iPhone, 3G iPhone, 3G iPhone

My sister has an iPhone now and yes, its nice, great, does what we want... but I'd prefer 3G.. more coverage in the UK =)

[big_malk]

I'm sure when the iPhone came out there were comparison videos showing how the EDGE iPhone wasn't much slower than 3G Phones were, now we have videos show it's a lot slower.... Funny how this easily changes to suit

[MikeDTyke]

Originally Posted by big_malk

I'm sure when the iPhone came out there were comparison videos showing how the EDGE iPhone wasn't much slower than 3G Phones were, now we have videos show it's a lot slower.... Funny how this easily changes to suit

That comparison was showing an Edge iPhone v a 3G N95. What it was proving was that even with a faster connection the current 3G phones were so slow in rendering it to make overall speed almost the same.

This is showing that a 3G iPhone, with some mitigating factors should be at least twice as fast as the old Edge phone.

RTFA.

[Laglorden]

Well, Edge is 384 kbit, "Turbo"-3G is 7,2 Mbit here i Sweden, soon 14,4 I imagine it's the same in most of the world?

So, It's like the difference between usb1 and usb2 or something... Huge difference, maybe not when rendering web-pages, but download your entire music-collection or something, or try streming highish-quality video from your home-server to your phone.

(I don't understand why people think they need lots of GB of memory on their phones, let the content stay at home and just access it from anywhere)

[elppa]

Originally Posted by MarkW19

I think Apple should also work on increasing the iPhone's rendering speed of webpages - on wifi, with my MacBook and iPhone next to eachother on my wifi network, my MacBook is so much faster than my iPhone generally, even on just simple mainly-text sites.

As well as just shifting to newer/different technologies/network types, they should really concentrate on the speed of the device itself.

This relates to other apps for me as well - I really wish the whole thing was a lot snappier and more instant, without the little delays all over the place (SMS, Calendar, Safari etc.)...

With the greatest respect, I don't think you really understand the technology that well.

Comparing the iPhone with a laptop is just simply not fair.

The iPhone has got more CPU power than most phones (~600MHz ARM chip) and the software is well optimised — don't forget it also has pretty much the full OS X software stack bar the GUI. The ARM CPU will not rival an Intel Core 2.

I have used a touch and found the fluidity and responsiveness a major plus.

[batchtaster]

Originally Posted by Laglorden

Well, Edge is 384 kbit, "Turbo"-3G is 7,2 Mbit here i Sweden, soon 14,4 I imagine it's the same in most of the world?

Um, yeah. My wired broadband is 512kbit/sec. Ain't no way the wireless 3G speeds are gonna even approach that. Australia's telecommunications infrastructure totally sucks dead rats.

The government is talking nation-wide upgrade to 12Mbit... but in, like, 5 years. By which point it will still be a joke thanks to advances in other countries like Sweden.

(Meanwhile, instead of doing the sensible thing and making parents responsible for their childrens' internet usage, they plan to lock the country down like China. I mean literally - they are using China as the template for Australia's internet censorship laws. Tech-wise, this country is total arse.)

[MarkW19]

Originally Posted by elppa

With the greatest respect, I don't think you really understand the technology that well.

Comparing the iPhone with a laptop is just simply not fair.

The iPhone has got more CPU power than most phones (~600MHz ARM chip) and the software is well optimised — don't forget it also has pretty much the full OS X software stack bar the GUI. The ARM CPU will not rival an Intel Core 2.

I have used a touch and found the fluidity and responsiveness a major plus.

I understand the technology, thanks. I could understand if we were talking about rendering huge pages with lots going on. But a simple text-based site is a good comparison, requiring little processing power from either.

My point is - for me, I use my iPhone on wifi a lot more than GSM, and it is the PHONE that is the bottleneck in terms of speed, not my connection speed.

If the phone itself was better optimised and less laggy, the whole web browsing experience would be much quicker and more usable, regardless of whether it's on a "2.5" or "3G" network.

On another note - indeed, having a ~600MHz processor inside it should mean it absolutely flies. Who needs a 2.5GHz Intel Core 2 Duo just to display a text-based website (or indeed, a ~600MHz one)?! My old Windows-based phones (HTC etc.) were MUCH snappier with Calendar, Contacts, SMS etc. My iPhone has delays all over the place, it's not just websites for me.

Don't get me wrong - I love my iPhone, but it certainly isn't perfect. And I find it takes me a lot longer to do certain things that I do daily and constantly (mainly Calendar, SMS) than it has done on other devices.

[Shadowriver]

Originally Posted by elppa

The iPhone has got more CPU power than most phones (~600MHz ARM chip)

Yes it has Samsung ARM11 620MHz but its underclocked to 412MHz, and speed its software controled ^^ so we didn't see max power of iPhone (and iPod Touch) yet

[elppa]

Originally Posted by MarkW19

I understand the technology, thanks. I could understand if we were talking about rendering huge pages with lots going on. But a simple text-based site is a good comparison, requiring little processing power from either.

Re-reading my post, I'm really sorry if I sounded condescending, it was never my intention, I just got a bit side-tracked by the comparison of a Laptop chip with a mobile chip.

No doubt Apple will continue to optimise iPhone OS. There's always a trade off between software sophistication and hardware requirements.

Windows Mobile (being licensed) has to perform on the “lowest common denominator” handsets, so no doubt has lighter hardware requirements.

Making there own hardware, Apple has a bit more flexibility in this area, but from the sounds of things could have optimised some areas better. There is no reason why SMS should lag, that is silly.

Obviously SMS is not something I got to try on the touch.

[revenantananias]

For what it is worth, my roommate had a blackjack on 3g, and my iPhone on the edge network loaded the BBC Frontpage faster. We live just north of Philly, and both had full bars. And my iPhone loaded the whole page, his blackjack loaded some crappy version.

I am content with the edge network, it takes less then 15 seconds to load macrumors website. But then again, I grew up with dial-up.

[rapiscan]

Originally Posted by MarkW19

I understand the technology, thanks. I could understand if we were talking about rendering huge pages with lots going on. But a simple text-based site is a good comparison, requiring little processing power from either.

Mark,

I say this with the same respect as the other poster, I don't think you understand the underlying technology required to process a webpage. It isn't as simple as streaming bits that represent text. The biggest bottle neck to TCP/IP traffic has always been the processor due to the huge amount of overhead it takes to process packets. This is especially the case when you have dropped packets and out of order packets (which are prevalent on this type of network). What's happening in the background to get that data to your screen is very complex.

To learn more about TCP/IP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP

[raggedjimmi]

Originally Posted by revenantananias

For what it is worth, my roommate had a blackjack on 3g, and my iPhone on the edge network loaded the BBC Frontpage faster. We live just north of Philly, and both had full bars. And my iPhone loaded the whole page, his blackjack loaded some crappy version.

I am content with the edge network, it takes less then 15 seconds to load macrumors website. But then again, I grew up with dial-up.

Rendering speed also comes into play. The iPhone has a very fast renderer compared to a lot of phones.

[bstpierre]

Originally Posted by MarkW19

My iPhone has delays all over the place, it's not just websites for me.

What I don't get is the long delay when starting up the Calculator. It comes up and then a second (or so) later the number shows up in the display and you can start using it. Why is that so slow?

[TheSpecialist]

The reason why the 3G Nokia N95 was slower then the 2.5 EDGE iPhone is because iPhone uses the real Safari, which renders much better then a the 'baby internet' of the N95.

[MarkW19]

Originally Posted by elppa

Re-reading my post, I'm really sorry if I sounded condescending, it was never my intention, I just got a bit side-tracked by the comparison of a Laptop chip with a mobile chip.

No probs, and yes, it looks like it could certainly do with more optimising. But it's a first generation device, and is fantastic. It just needs some tweaking With the MS Exchange/Enterprise stuff soon coming, I think Apple will really need to speed the thing up - I can't imagine business users liking having to wait for the calendar/calculator to come up or register their input, etc. They're used to it being a lot more instant, even on their crappy Windows-based devices.

Originally Posted by rapiscan

Mark,

I say this with the same respect as the other poster, I don't think you understand the underlying technology required to process a webpage. It isn't as simple as streaming bits that represent text. The biggest bottle neck to TCP/IP traffic has always been the processor due to the huge amount of overhead it takes to process packets. This is especially the case when you have dropped packets and out of order packets (which are prevalent on this type of network). What's happening in the background to get that data to your screen is very complex.

To learn more about TCP/IP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP

My complaints aren't just about Safari - they're about the whole device, which is full of delays when trying to do only very simple things (open an SMS, open calendar, add a calendar appointment, open the calculator - all things I could do instantly on my old Windows Mobile devices), as well as Safari.

To be honest, I'm not too bothered about the underlying technology, as most users aren't/won't be. All I know is that Apple has said this is "Mac OS X in your pocket", which it is, but if it compromises too much on basic things like speed, there's really got to be room for improvement to live up to that claim. A ~600MHz processor - in a device that Apple clearly wants in everyone's pockets, to also be used by BUSINESS users where speed and efficiency is the key, and time is money - has got to be capable of displaying a simple webpage quicker than it is now, which is currently much slower than even a modest/low-spec laptop PC/Mac. Even if I'm sitting in the garden with my iPhone in my hand, I tend to go into my house, up the stairs to the other side of the house, and turn on my Mac, just to do simple web browsing as it is so much faster. This is Apple - I have faith they'll improve on it.

Originally Posted by bstpierre

What I don't get is the long delay when starting up the Calculator. It comes up and then a second (or so) later the number shows up in the display and you can start using it. Why is that so slow?

Yep, I get the same delay with most things - SMS, Calendar, and more.

Anyway, sorry for hi-jacking the thread!