Off To The Races, EDGE vs. 3G
August 4, 2008 by Ryan Ray
If you can’t tell what this post is going to be about then just slow down, breathe, re-read it and get ready for a real world test of the EDGE vs 3G networks. I know it’s exciting and the first for the website to actually get an EDGE and 3G test. It gets even better though than just a comparison with words. I brought along my GL2 to film as my girlfriend and I went to St. Louis. My cute lady kindly filmed for me. She’s already a pro if you were wondering, she helps man….errr woman the camera as I try to show you how cool my iPhone is. So call her up if you need a video made because I do, haha.
Speaking of my weekend I had quite the interesting experience this weekend, my girlfriend had two friends come down from Indianapolis via Greyhound Bus and we picked them up on Friday night at 10 p.m. It wasn’t exactly the best time to be in those parts of town but we survived luckily. My girlfriend and I went up to St. Louis early to check out the mall during tax free weekend, and try to sneak into an Apple store to fix my battery issues I’ve been having with my Macbook Pro. Well the Apple store had a big line just to get into it on Friday so we skipped that and walked around the mall. We decided to head to Starbucks and brainstorm some ideas for videos for you guys. In St. Louis I got great 3G signal so we decided to feature that in this first video. More are definitely to come as time goes on. I just so happened to leave my Macbook Pro power supply at Starbucks all weekend rendering me useless until we went back and got it today, but that’s another story in itself.
Back to the 3G goodness I experienced. If it wasn’t already obvious to you 3G is much faster than EDGE, but that’s putting your battery at risk for a quicker drain than just using EDGE. Think of it like this though, on EDGE you sit around waiting longer for pages to load, but on 3G you don’t wait as long so do you think it equals out for time spent waiting vs battery life? You aren’t sitting and waiting as much on 3G compared to EDGE so the time saved might be worth the battery usage. You know what I’m saying, just a thought?
In my experience with 3G speed it was about two times faster than on EDGE. Keep in mind on both networks I received full signal, and I sat in the same parking lot during these tests. It took EDGE 30.8 seconds to load iPhonenuts.com but on 3G it only took 17.9 seconds. Also not filmed for the video I was using GPS and 3G and didn’t have any of the problems like my EDGE signal dropping out, or GPS not locking onto my location. Trust me I wore out my GPS this weekend driving around St. Louis. We went to the Galleria Mall, found a Starbucks with Google Maps, then found our way to the City Museum, next to the Greyhound Bus stop, and finally to get out of the city and on our way home. 3G allowed for much faster route searches and the maps loaded in a blink of an eye. I was very thankful for that compared to using EDGE and losing the maps, etc…
Don’t just take me at my word for it, watch the short video below. It’s a brief show of EDGE vs. 3G speeds. If you have any request for 3G tests please leave a comment and let me know. I would love to make a video for you, I’ll be back around the fast 3G network very soon so let me know ASAP. If you’ve already tested your 3G let me know your results and experience with it. It’s much appreciated. Thanks for reading, and again let me know what you think!
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Ryan,
Do you get a list of how many unique visitors you get per day?
I am not trying to be nosy, just curious. I love your site and was just curious if all of your other readers were just really quiet people that didn’t comment much.
-Nicki
Hey Nicki,
I don’t have access to that kind of information for this website. I can tell from my blogger admin page how many total hits there have been for each article so far, but that isn’t accurate at all to say how many unique visitors come by each day. I can tell the site is growing, but by how much exactly I dont know! Haha, maybe Gyutae can give us some stats sometime.
Someday perhaps more of the readers will come out of the woodwork, and leave comments like you do! So if you read this, follow Nicki’s lead and comment! Thanks for the question Nicki!
Hope you guys do a full write-up on the changes from iPhone 2.0 to 2.0.1!!!
Hey Nicki, there is an article up about the 2.0.1 update from Derek. If there is anything else you’d like to see let me know.