IntoMobile’s 3G vs EDGE webpage load-time shootout – just how slow is the iPhone?
By Will Park on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 5:43 PM PST In AT&T, Apple, HTC, Research, iPhone
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 (NYSE: T)’s 3G network, and squared it off against an Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) 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 that aspect was fairly controlled for in this test.
Check out the video below to get an idea for real-world load-times.
Summary:
- The AT&T Tilt loaded the ShopBop.com webpage in 37 seconds, whereas the iPhone took a whole 26 seconds.
- IntoMobile.com took 51 seconds to load on the Tilt and 83 seconds on the iPhone.
- Load-times for CalBar.com were the most comparable – 15 seconds on the HTC Kaiser and 18 seconds on the iPhone.
From a purely objective standpoint, the iPhone is an incredibly competent web-browsing device – especially given its EDGE-only limitations. The AT&T Tilt is most definitely the faster web-surfer, but only marginally so (the load-time gap is more pronounced for image- and javascript-intense webpages such as IntoMobile.com). Interestingly, the iPhone beat out the Tilt in loading the ShopBop.com webpage. The rendering engine combined with good processing power keeps the iPhone nipping at the heels of 3G devices. From a subjective standpoint, we’d have to say that the iPhone’s web-browsing experience is clearly superior and is worth waiting a few extra seconds. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to test any Opera browsers. We expect that Opera on the AT&T Tilt would blow the iPhone out of the water.
On that note, keep your eyes peeled for a follow-up test with the Opera browser!
We can’t wait for the 3G iPhone…
That is one relevant and suitable test. I’d love to see this included in your reviews (if possible). It would make for a much better benchmark (with the usual caveats of environment effecting results).
The rendering engine in Safari is miles better than the one in IE mobile. Besides that, the reprocessing of the page for the smaller screen seems to indicate a good bit more going on under the hood for IE Mobile than Safari. Well done Apple.
It’s well known that Mobile IE is particularly crap, why was it used? I thought this was about data connections, not processors.
Yeah, too bad you couldn’t test with Opera (not mini).
IE Mobile is known to be a WAP browser, nothing else, like the desktop version.
What about Minimo ? It’s far from being finished but it should load pages
Also, the loader bar sometimes wait on “behind the scenes” scripts to load when the page is visually fully loaded (advertisements / google analytics scripts / ajax or beautifying libs etc… )
That said, even beyond the browser bottleneck, 3G would definitly give a sensible speed bump, but I think on the mid-term run that it wouldn’t be that awesome.
And that the 3G iPhone is, now, more a commercial need than anything else.
cya !
Hopin’ to get my iPhone before it gets it’s storage space taxed by french gov’t (and before 1.1.3 which might be harder to jailbreak)
I rank PIE at the bottom of the list of ALL browsers for speed, right next to the iPhone on EDGE. The bottleneck is phenomenal.
Where’s the S60 browser? That browser would pwn anything you threw at it with a 3G connection.
Other browsers, including S60 and Opera coming soon.
jonnybruha,
Well, if you have a look over here http://www.applephoneinfo.de/2007/11/edge-gegen-umts.html
Even though it’s a less well powered e61i, there’s still a very slight margin in favor of 3G, even against a tougher N95, I’m not sure it would “blast” the iPhone away…
you should have measured the real net data throughput of both connections first, before the website load comparison. you say the tilt had 3G – what 3G? did it had a 1.8Mb/s HSDPA connection at that moment, or was it just native UMTS, with 384kb/s max? to much unknown variables here..
Actually, every web surfer I’ve seen who posts on forums for the Tilt uses Opera Mini, not Opera Mobile. Speedwise Mini blows Mobile away on the Tilt, renders pages beautifully and has some features Opera Mobile doesn’t have. I think you’ll find that Opera Mini on Edge is faster on the Tilt than IE on 3G. (I’m typing this into Opera Mini, in fact.)
Well i’ve got the T mobile Vario 2 which has processing power and 3G HSDPA. I loaded the shopbop.com site in 13seconds
The E61i was using 3G, not HSDPA, which both the N95-3 and the Tilt use. There isn’t that big of a difference between EDGE and UMTS speeds if HSDPA isn’t present.
There’s a browser performance comparison review of Opera, PIE, Minimo, Picsel, and Netfront at this blog – http://www.pocketables.net/2007/09/browser-perform.html
They also have a load time comparison of the iphone against stuff like the mylo, nokia n800, and archos wifi players – http://www.pocketables.net/2007/08/review-website-.html
All the test are on wifi tho.
YOu should of tested out the N95-3..I loaded my pages fast..So much for the tilt.
Yups, Safari on iPhone is cool, and Opera is excellent on WM devices, but I am all for Opera Mini for now on my HTC Artemis.
Waiting for Opera 9 now.
In your vid, signal strength on the Tilt was at 2 bars, but signal strength on the iPhone is 5 bars! Um, do you think that would skew the results?
Also, others have mentioned that straight UMTS and EDGE won’t differ that much and Pocket IE is a dog. I would have preferred to see the Tilt at full bars, and a little H displayed before you tested. What you’ve done is take a rabbit, bound it’s legs, starved it for a week, and then raced it against the fastest turtle.
Also, Shopbop has lots of images. If iphone uses a proxy to strip out image detail, while Tilt is downloading the entire image, the test is unfair.
Don’t get me wrong, Apple fanboys, the iPhone is a totally incredible, beautiful, easy to use, device. The Tilt is a very powerful, highly functional, open, device. They’re both great. But this face-off smells a little.
That said, what you show approximates the out of the box experience for the mass market. The iPhone and Safari do make a remarkably good mobile experience, where even as a Tilt owner, I can’t ever recommend my phone to non-tech enthusiasts.
More information for this topic see at http://fileshunt.com. Maybe it will change your point of view.
If you can search
Hi. Good site.
HTC Mogul running Opera 9.5 beta: shopbop in 18 secs, calbar in 15, and unfortunately, intomobile didn’t finish loading because my crappy phone ran out of memory (shoulda run the test on the HTC Touch series). Still, the numbers on Sprint EVDO Rev.A are much more impressive than Safari Mobile on iPhone (and let’s keep in mind that even if you were on AT&T’s 3G network, their coverage is so poor that you would hardly ever get decent speeds). Oh, and for you techies, RSSI averaged -64 to -68dBm, DRC averaged 1.2 to 2.4mbps.
I never use IE anymore… just a horrible experience. I sometimes use Skyfire due to flash support and rendering speeds, but I often have trouble communicating with their server. And I find Opera to be smoother with a slightly easier-to-use UI.