Pre Download Speed Test: High Speed, Low Latency

Xenophonite in our forums engaged in one of our favorite pre-phone-launch activities for any phone: checking out DSL Reports Mobile Speed Test results and looking for browsers attached to unreleased phones. To wit: the Palm Pre. The results: fast.

1728 0.157s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
1685 0.188s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
533 0.125s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
550 0.117s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
711 0.134s (400k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
1391 0.14s (1024k) spcsdns.net Mozilla/5.0 (webOS/1.0; U; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.27.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/1.0 Safari/525.27.1 Pre/1.0
In plain English, this means you're looking at download speeds of between 500k and 1700k - which is mighty fast. Faster, we think, than most people are managing on iPhones.

Just as important as speed is latency. Speed is how fast your data comes down, Latency is how long it takes to get your connection going in the first place. Latency is notoriously bad on mobile networks, but it's darn good on Sprint's EVDO network - coming in reliably under .2 seconds, while an iPhone's latency on AT&T's over-stretched network often is longer than a second.

Add in the Pre's lightning fast rendering time and you can expect that your browsing experience on the Pre will be a joy. Maybe, just maybe, it really will be 4 times faster than the iPhone.

[Orginally posted at precentral.net]