[diginixy]

From the Boy Genius. I'm heart broken. Check the link

BlackBerry 8320 Wi-Fi vs. BlackBerry 8300 EDGE speed test | The Boy Genius Report

[BamaFan2989]

ahhhh!

that made me soo sad :[

[tdawg00]

Originally Posted by diginixy

From the Boy Genius. I'm heart broken. Check the link

BlackBerry 8320 Wi-Fi vs. BlackBerry 8300 EDGE speed test | The Boy Genius Report

Odd I did the same test and it worked faster.

They might have a wifi connection but they might have 10 laptops hooked up or was download music or something else.

Wifi is just like cdma, the more users the lower the signal quality and data speeds get divided

[diginixy]

That's very true. I mean I'm sure the office their site runs out of has several people all connected to the same network. But nonetheless I really hope this is simply an isolated case. For anyone else who reads this thread wanna hold another test between the two, and provide some feedback?

[TroyDBrown]

Wow that was slow. Mine seems much faster. I ran many tests earlier today and my friend decided to try his own tests with MySpace and was excited about how fast it loaded via WiFi.

[30PSI]

That's exactly how wifi works on my 8320 slow as shit. I took it back to tmo and they connected it through hotspot and it was still slow I'm pretty pissed I hope they'll release new OS soon to fix this problem, but it seems like the processor is the bottleneck it's just not capable of handling wifi speed.

[Lex Luthor]

WiFi speeds on my 8320 are faster, I definitely prefer using the WiFi connection when using the browser as I tend to get ridiculously slow EDGE speeds in my area quite frequently.

[evmonk]

Just watched the whole vid and it was pretty depressing. I don't know why BGR had to be such a jerk about the speed difference though. He was constantly going, "What the F$%K!? This is wifi on tmobile and ATT's EDGE network is killing it!!" It made me question his objectivity. Also, there were some good points in the comments about how ATT has proxy servers that compress a lot of the data (much like opera mini), so that could be skewing the results.

That being said, I haven't been thrilled with my speeds over wifi either. It's clear there's some kind of bottleneck. I don't have the opera mini 4 beta installed yet, but I've heard it runs faster. What do you all think?

As I said in this post, I'm getting adequate signal strength over wifi, not great. Even standing 5 feet from the router I only get 3-4 bars. On average I get 1-2 bars less than my laptop (which picks up a signal well) from the same location. Go to "Set Up Wifi" to check signal strength -- how many bars are you all getting?

Of course, signal strength is pretty irrelevant when there's a bottleneck. Is there a chance that Tmobile releases some kind of update that lets the wifi run faster?

[JSanders]

I heard BG say WTF maybe 2-3 times, not constantly I think he was astounded at the slacker WiFi ability.

Who said he has to be objective? lol, even Dan Rather didn't have to be objective.

[xploit]

OMG!! all this is gonna be fixed in a weeks months down the road. WI-fi is gonna be faster than edge. just like everyone hates VISTA right now! and talk about how bad it sucks....then a SP1 is realeased and everyone LOVES IT! faster OS every made blah! blah! blah!

[John Clark]

But which one is faster on the back side of a hotel where signal is -100db or at 41,000 feet in my corporate jet (w/wifi onboard?) That wifi connection is gonna look real good to me then!

[kd78]

Originally Posted by evmonk

Go to "Set Up Wifi" to check signal strength -- how many bars are you all getting?

1 bar, 10 feet from router with laptop getting a 99% signal strength. It must have something to do with wifi radio powersaving on the bb...

[sLpFhaWK]

I was just going to comment on how their wifi was prolly seeding mad torrents while conducting those tests, thats why edge was loading quicker. But then again who knows, we'll see when I get the curve.

[BallHawk3]

kinda figured. My personal phone is a 8700g with t-mo. Had a 7130e and 8703e from sprint. Located in los angeles.

Really, there was NO difference in comparing the speeds. Sometimes the tmo was quicker (edge) and sometimes the sprint was quicker (EV-DO). Now don't get me wrong, EV-DO is BLAZING fast, the internet cards and when using the sprint blackberry's as phone as modem. But when browsing on the BB itself, it was VERY comparable. I would say the sprint blackberrys had a SLIGHT edge in speed but nothing really to brag about. It was more consistent if anything.

[evmonk]

Originally Posted by kd78

1 bar, 10 feet from router with laptop getting a 99% signal strength.

Wow, that seems particularly weak. It sounds like there's a lot of variation depending on the device. We need more people to report before we can know for sure though. If anyone is getting 5 bars we may want to exchange ours for new ones.

[flar]

A couple of things:

- There are different browser configurations (as in different Options pages) for Wifi and regular Network browsing on the 8320. There are a lot of options that could be different that would affect overall browsing speed, including the fact that CSS is on by default for Wifi, but not for the Internet browsing. There is also an image quality option, and while it is on a common page (i.e. doesn't have different settings for Wifi vs. Internet browsing) it may have a different default between the two devices/carriers. There was no attempt in the video to show or mention if all of the settings were the same between the two (all they mention is that the cache was cleared).

- Their own test shows that Wifi is *WAY* faster - but that something else causes stalls. Look at the video closely when they load the first "race" page that is a post on the web site. The Wifi progress bar races all the way to the right in a couple of seconds and then hangs with the last maybe 5% left while the Edge phone takes another minute to get there. The Edge phone also sort of hangs at that 5% remaining mark, but then they both complete around the same time. If the Wifi phone downloaded larger images then it may take longer to post-process them - representing the stall at the end of the progress.

- Listen to the guy's attitude. He's anything but objective. The fact that he had to post a disclaimer about a problem with the Javascript settings is also a good indicator that he is more interested in proving that he's right than in objectively analyzing the situation. There is nearly a full minute of silence in the video where the Wifi phone has essentially loaded all of the data and the Edge phone is still clearly struggling to load it all - and yet does he fill that minute with comments like "Oh my god! The Edge phone is *STILL* loading data! How could it possibly be this slow!"? No, that would undermine his point. Instead he waits the minute in silence for the Edge phone to catch up while the Wifi phone is stuck in the mysterious end of page limbo before he says "At this point they are both basically at the same point". Well, yes, after almost a full minute of catching up. To be fair, the fact that the Wifi phone stalled at the end for much longer is a problem, to be sure, but one that could be investigated more thoroughly and fixed if one was trying to be objective. Instead he's taking advantage of this problem to try to "prove" that Wifi is inherently not any faster. It is, but there does seem to be a counter-balancing issue that RIM needs to deal with in the software.

- Another review I saw noted that the internal browser didn't seem any faster on Wifi, but that Opera screamed on Wifi. Issues like that "stall at 95% loaded" problem which I've seen on a number of pages myself could account for a lack of perceived performance difference. If I could get Opera to run I could see for myself.

[flar]

I'm getting 3 or 4 bars in the same room with my DIR-655. Not sure how those bars map to signal strength - I've seen driver updates vary the number of bars on my laptop by a lot when the effective throughput didn't change and a lower level utility showed roughly the same raw signal strength numbers, so don't trust "number of bars" further than you can throw a cell tower...

(Edit: And, wouldn't you know, just after I post this my laptop signal strength drops from 5 bars to 4 bars which it hardly ever does - probably to spite my bad-mouthing of its signal strength accuracy... )

[kd78]

Flar, great points. I agree, the wifi browser was stalling for some reason. Opera is much quicker and much faster on wifi than edge in my test of 5 websites I frequent on my laptop.

[kingsfan3344]

I've been using an 8300 on tmo since it came out and got the 8320 today. All day had slow speeds with wifi and various locations. Then I saw the bgr video which really got me thinking. I conducted the same tests as bgr and had similar results. I also ran the tests on Opera and although Opera was much faster than the bb browser the speed difference between edge and wifi was the same ratio. I also conducted the test using only the 8320 and each time clearing the cache and switching wifi/mobile network on/off for each test. Same results. So I packed up my 8320 to return in, reinstalled everything back to the 8300. BUT I just read the post about OS 4.3 and will wait and try that before returning. One thing to note: bgr as well as myself are running BES, (but set browser options accordingly) not sure if this matters.

(Sorry for the multiple post, I didn't see the post come up, I had to refresh)

[John Clark]

Kingsfan3344, You've posted the same thing 3 times now.