iPhone EDGE browsing comparable to Nokia 3G Web

There were a lot of readers who said I was nuts to claim that the iPhone's EDGE service was at all comparable to a real 3G experience on my Nokia E61i. Now MacDailyNews has uncovered data to show that I am not crazy. German Web site iPhone Infoblog videotaped both phones with WiFi turned off and raced the iPhone's EDGE service experience against a Nokia E61i using UMTS. The video, shown above, demonstrates that in fact, the two experiences are nearly identical in speed, largely because the iPhone's much faster processor and quicker rendering compensates for the E61i's multi-megabit UMTS bandwidth on real Web pages.

This experiment demonstrates the power of mobile phone carrier marketing. The ideal business model is one where a vendor can bill for a service that people don't or can't actually use; ask anyone who owns a gym. Mobile phone carriers have been pushing multi-megabit 3G mobile phone services, knowing full well that most mobile phones actually can't keep up with them. And that's why data service for laptop 3G adaptors is so much more expensive than 3G mobile phone services. Laptops with multi-gigahertz processors actually use significant portions of 3G bandwidth, requiring mobile carriers to incur more provisioning costs to support those platforms.

But it also proves that raw bandwidth isn't the be-all and end-all of a mobile Internet experience, just as my prior article claimed. Processor speed, memory capacity, battery life, latency, and cost all affect the consumer's experience in different ways. Good product design strikes a reasonable compromise among those constraints. Great product design creates user experiences that transcend them. And the iPhone appears to have done just that, despite its lack of 3G bandwidth.

Full disclosure: The author is long Apple at the time of writing.

Technorati Tags: 3G, Apple, EDGE, iPhone, Nokia, Nokia E61i, UMTS