Our iPhone 3G arrived just an hour ago and we can tell you it doesn't need to train for an Olympic Web browsing dash. We have seen all the unboxings and the early reviews so we thought it was best to put the iPhone 3G and its EDGE predecessor up against each other in a series of Web browsing tests because, of course, the defining characteristic of the new iPhone is its data speeds.
We started out or tests by having both phones visit NYTimes.com. The iPhone 3G KOed the first generation by 28 seconds. But we suggest you watch the video below because you have to see it to really understand the difference in loading speeds. The NY Times and all the images were completely done loading by the time the EDGE phone caught up; in that time you could have already decided what article you wanted to read on the main page and navigated to it.
We saw the same thing happen when we visited our own graphics heavy homepage (www.laptopmag.com) and espn.com. As you will see from the scores below, Apple's touted "double the speed" is more than right - in some cases the iPhone 3G is almost three times the speed of the original.
Since we were feeling a bit bad for the sluggish first generation iPhone we turned the Wi-Fi on both phones and had them go at it over the same wireless network. The phones were neck and neck in the Wi-Fi test, though the 3G came out 4 seconds faster. We aren't completely convinced that the 3G's wireless is faster but we plan on putting it through some more tests for our full review.
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