I just saw Jeff Atwood’s entry from last week on why you don’t want an iPhone, and his well-reasoned advice boils down to this: EDGE is painfully slow compared to 3G, and you should wait until they iron out the bugs in v2.0. For these reasons, even the Apple faithful are sitting v1.0 out. Sprint is obviously thrilled right now.
As far as I can figure, the difference between EDGE and 3G networks like EVDO is presently 4-5x, accounting for the recent boost. There is a free and easy way to get 4-5x faster downloads on any network, even EDGE: Skweezer. Because content is pre-compressed on our servers before it even starts down the thin invisible tube to your phone, there’s less overall data transmitted, which translates into a faster browsing experience. It is the equivalent of turning your 200 kbit connection into a 1 mbit connection. Basic web surfing will be loads faster with Skweezer than without.
You still don’t believe me? It’s been a while since we did a site comparison, so I ran a few sites through Firebug this evening (July 3, 2007) to compare their total original page weight with the Skweezed versions, with images on and off. Unfortunately the figures aren’t as dramatic as they once were because server-side content compression (gzip and deflate) is more commonplace now, and that used to be an easy win for us. Nevertheless, Skweezer still always brought the page weight down, as follows:
The worst value in each column is in red, and the best value is green. The fastest way to browse is without images, but that’s only useful if you’re just information hunting. Even with images on, the median speedup for browsing sites through Skweezer was 4.7 x, if we assume that the network is the main bottleneck. If you want to run your own tests, be aware that IE reports uncompressed page size in the page properties dialog, while Firefox reports the number of bytes received for the main HTML document, reflecting compression. The best way to compare total page weight accurately is to use a tool like Firebug or a proxy like Fiddler2.
Posted in Skweezer, iPhone, mobilizing, tips
