[west3man]

I've got a 755p on Sprint, right now. I wonder if the internet connection will be or seem faster on the Palm Pre (on Sprint's network, of course). Anyone know?

I'm not all that familiar with the different terms for mobile providers' internet speeds/types, so sites with that kind of information aren't as helpful, to me.

I had a Treo 650 on Sprint's network and its speed was comparable to dial-up, as I recall. The 755p was supposed to access a faster internet ... network than my 650 could. That seems to be true (sometimes). I just used my 755p to go to an ebay results page (not the mobile version) the other day and it was a nightmare. It took too long to load a page and it would sometimes say a page was TOO LARGE to load/display.

I am so sick of that I don't have the words to describe it. I think it's been made clear that we can expect more webpages to display on the Pre, but does anyone know whether the internet connection will be any faster?

[eekinsman]

Well any increased speed you have experienced from the 650 to the 755 would be due to the evdo capability of the 755, though I agree that the great speed we were promised is often sluggish and inconsistent. As to your question, as I understand it the Pre has evdo rev A, which I take is supposed to be a faster experience. Will it be? I dont know. Seems like replacing dreaded Blazer is bound to help.

Additional question from me will be WiFi. I've never had it on a smartphone, thanks to palm treo/sprint's genius, so, what kind of performance does one expect on a WiFi enabled smartphone? Thats one feature I really exited about.

[jbg7474]

The other main issue is how fast the processor can digest the info it pulls down. The radio is pretty fast on the 755p, but it takes forever to render a page. You can see this when you hit the back button--it's pulling the page from memory.

The Pre will have a much faster radio and a much faster processor to render pages. On the recent webinar, they loaded big12.com (I think) in 8 seconds. There is some speculation that it may have been loading the page from memory (via a cache), but this still really fast for a handset. It takes Firefox that long to load that page on my laptop.

[mrkalel]

I went from the 755p to the 800w, night and day difference with web... Rev A I believe.... much faster

[jhoff80]

Rev A's major improvements are actually in upload speed. It does improve download as well, but not to the same extent, so any improvement you notice in download will probably be because of the faster processor rendering.

That being said, I don't know how many times on my Treos I've entered in the URL and it takes forever to even send the request before the page starts to download, so it should be a snappier experience all around.

[Merovingian]

Like someone else mentioned, EVDO Rev.A would be the advantage on the Pre vs 755p but also, the Blazer browser on the 755p is like a Snail compared to the Webkit-based browser that the Pre is rocking.

I remember back in '06 when I went from the 700p to my current 700wx it was like night and day.

[PedroTheGoat]

From the looks of the demo, webpages will have almost desktop worthy rendering. I think it will be the fastest browser seen on a handset to date. It sure will beat the heck out of my Blackberry. The web browser is my main want with the Pre. I don't think I will be dissapointed.

[sub150]

Internet should shine on the pre by watching the demo's. It will be nice being able to type in usernames and passwords efficiently with a keyboard as well. Such a pain to type in anything but lowercase letters in an iphone or storm.

And the big12 site load comparison is absurd...if it really loads that fast I won't need to buy a netbook...

[Beanis]

Internet speed of a 3G phone is mostly bottlenecked by the phones CPU and rendering speed of web pages, not the network itself.

All you have to do is tether a phone to a real computer to prove this.

[EeZeEpEe]

There's definitely bottlenecking due to CPU and rendering of the phone. I've tested the speed on my 755p with DSL Report's Mobile Speed Test and get anywhere from 400-500 kbps download speeds. When connected to my computer with USB Modem I get around 0.9-1.1 mbps.

[west3man]

There's definitely bottlenecking due to CPU and rendering of the phone. I've tested the speed on my 755p with DSL Report's Mobile Speed Test and get anywhere from 400-500 kbps download speeds. When connected to my computer with USB Modem I get around 0.9-1.1 mbps.

I wouldn't expect rendering to impede a speed test.

[rambo47]

Perhaps the Pre will benefit from similar architecture changes that make the Blackberry Javelin on EDGE faster (in many tasks) than the 3G Blackberry Bold. The Javelin uses 8 data pipelines vs. the 2 or 4 pipelines of the Bold.

[Kupe]

I wouldn't expect rendering to impede a speed test.

Depends on the speedtest. And don't confuse "rendering" with graphics only - complicated html, scripting, java, etc requires a bunch of CPU muscle too. In other words - yes, rendering can impeed a speed test. You only need to use Blazer once on dslreports to prove it.

[EeZeEpEe]

Depends on the speedtest. And don't confuse "rendering" with graphics only - complicated html, scripting, java, etc requires a bunch of CPU muscle too. In other words - yes, rendering can impeed a speed test. You only need to use Blazer once on dslreports to prove it.

Yeah I try to hit "click here" as fast as I can to get the best results. haha. And at 1MB file size it takes so much long for the link to show so my best speeds are always at 400k.

[Jdub11]

I also have a 755p and the speed of the Pre definitely looks a ton faster than the speed of the 755p. We'll have to see though. Like they're saying though, it's 4x faster than the Iphone, and I totally agree from messing around with my Bro-in-law's Iphone. Safari isn't all that great on there. I'm looking forward to the live full pages on the Pre Mos Def.

[MannyZ28]

Who really cares about a speed test, it's all about how fast a browser feels.

Best example, on the same phone, compare Opera Mobile 9.5 to Skyfire. They both use the same connection, obviously, but different rendering techniques. The biggest difference is that Skyfire is server based, meaning that a proxy server is fullfilling the requests the user asks for. Opera Mobile 9.5 does all that work by itself. As a result, Skyfire renders way faster, unless the Skyfire servers are overrun with requests.

I use Opera Mobile 9.5 on my Sprint Touch just because it handles zooming, panning, and text reformating way better. No matter how close you zoom in, the text appears on the screen in such a way that you don't have to scroll left and right to read.

Skyfire is a bit odd at handling the above points, but it does do flash! Security is a big issue though.

[reminiz]

Pardon the ignorance of the question here, but will anything other than a software update have to be done for the Pre to jump up to 4G? Like what is currently in the baltimore and some other areas.

[deleonj1225]

Pardon the ignorance of the question here, but will anything other than a software update have to be done for the Pre to jump up to 4G? Like what is currently in the baltimore and some other areas.

unless its already built into the pre for future updates, its prob most def a hardware upgrade

[Aero]

Who really cares about a speed test, it's all about how fast a browser feels.

95% agree. tethering does matter to lot of people but there is no reason to expect tethering will be slow.

[dbpaddler]

4G is wimax and not on the Pre. Heck, it's an extra $20 or so per month to do wimax on a card. If they built in into the Pre, you wouldn't have a reason to buy a new one when Wimax goes nationwide.

Was going to try it out in Philly, but I couldn't justify the extra cost per month. Made zero sense.