Mobile Productivity: Why EDGE on the iPhone doesn't suck as much as you think

When Apple first announced that the iPhone would have EDGE instead of UTMS, it immediately disqualified itself as an option for my next phone. I have been using an HTC TyTN, a 3G/UTMS enabled smartphone with Pocket IE and Opera for about a year. Frankly, the experience of browsing is slow and painful. The thought of taking a step backwards and slowing down browsing even further was unacceptable. However, after running Safari on the iPhone over EDGE side by side with Opera on the Windows Mobile Phone over UTMS, I have discovered a subtly of mobile browsing that I had not previously occurred to me.

The Punchline

Browsing on the iPhone with EDGE isn't much slower than browsing with 3G Broadband on comparable smartphones.

The Mobile Browsing Process

I know that sounds crazy, but let's analyze the mobile browsing process, particularly for interactions with web applications (my new favorite use). The mobile browsing process can be broken down into three distinct phases: Navigation, Loading and Rendering, and Reading and Processing.

Navigation

The navigation process encompasses everything I do from the point of time in which I decide to seek out a piece of information or capture a piece of information until I the browser has registered that request and is working on it. For me, this includes:

Turning on my phone
Launching a browser
Entering a URL or retrieving a bookmark

Loading And Rendering

The Loading And Rendering process is all about the raw power of the phone. It includes:

Posting the request to a remote server
Downloading the results
rendering the results on the screen

Reading and Processing

The Reading and Processing process is what I do to close the loop on the request. In other words, I went to this page for a reason. I either need to enter some information, interact with some controls, scroll through the page to find what I am looking for. So the basic breakdown is:

Orient myself to the structure of the page
Locate the content I require
Interact with the page (controls, forms, links, etc)

The Comparison

With my HTC TyTN (slow processor, small screen, but blindingly fast network) that process looks something like:

As you might guess, my Loading and Rendering time was reduced quite nicely with the 3G browsing. What is more surprising has been my experiences with the iPhone and the PAINFULLY SLOW EDGE NETWORK. What I have found is that while there is a dramatic and noticeable slowdown in the Loading and Rendering component of the browsing experience, the ergonomics of the phone, coupled with a great rendering engine and decent processor end up creating an overall faster browsing experience for me (and certainly a more enjoyable one).

Conclusion

Why is it that my overall experience is faster, while my network is so sssslllloooowww? I would encourage you to take a look at my post on why the iPhone is such a great mobile application development platform. To recap, it boils down to innovation in getting you where you want to go quickly (Navigation) and making it easy for you to find and interact with the content you need, despite the fact you are doing so on a 3 inch screen.

Comments

Interesting theory. It would make more sense to put some quantifiable data to accompany this. For example, you can time how long to open certain pages (like cnn.com) and compare it with a 3G phone's browser. I haven't seen such data in other reviews either.

Posted by: eatalay | July 05, 2007 at 10:18 PM

That's a great suggestion. I've only had the phone for a week now, but I'll endeavor to pull some quantifiable data together. One challenge with that is that it won't be apples to apples. Particularly with web applications, the Opera and Pocket IE browsers have a challenge rendering the "real" site, thus the mobile version with limited feature sets are required. Your idea of targeting media sites (news, etc) will help isolate that variable and level the playing field.

Posted by: Erik Huddleston | July 06, 2007 at 03:24 PM