iPhone 3G S Smokes the iPhone 3G In Every Speed Test: Over 2X Faster

The iPhone 3G ($478.00) S (S is for Speed) arrived in our offices today, and the first thing we wanted to find out was how much “Speed,” that ‘S’ really added to the new iPhone.

Like a fine wine, the iPhone 3G S should improve with age. That’s because it supports AT&T’s new 7.2Mbps HSPA network, which has not fully rolled out yet. Even still, we’ve seen massive speed improvements over the original iPhone 3G. And why shouldn’t we? That phone is said to have a speed cap around 1.4Mbps, far below the maximum throughput of the 3G S, and the new iPhone also has a zippier 600MHz processor. We put the new iPhone against the 3G in head to head tests to find out just how much “Speed,” the 3G S offers.

Our first trial was loading the New York Times’ full HTML home page in our office and then again on the ground. Next we ran the SpeedTest.net iPhone application to get some hard data on just how fast our download and upload speeds were. Finally, we loaded the Associated Press iPhone application to see how much faster the processor could launch an app.

Web Results
On the 21st floor of our building, the iPhone 3G S loaded the New York Times homepage in just 21 seconds, while the iPhone 3G was chugging along past the 40 second mark before we decided to stop the test. In previous runs, we found that the iPhone 3G loaded NYT.com in about 50 seconds and the Palm Pre loaded it in 33 seconds.

Next we averaged the load times on the ground in a moving vehicle. The iPhone 3G loaded NYT.com in an average of 40 seconds while the iPhone 3G S had an average load time of just 17 seconds. That’s a 23 second difference, and an indicator that the iPhone 3G S is about 57.5 percent faster than the 3G in Web surfing tests. That’s zippy but not quite the claim Apple made that the phone would load the New York Times 2.9X faster, but as AT&T rolls out 7.2HSPA we’ll likely see even more improvements.

Speed Test Results
In our office and using SpeedTest.net, we found that the iPhone 3G S had a peak download speed of  344Kbps while the iPhone 3G capped out at 104Kbps. That test yielded about a [[Update: 230 percent increase]] in performance, but that was on the 21st floor of our building. Out on the ground, the iPhone 3G S capped out at an impressive 1155Kbps, which is comparable to what you would find with your mobile broadband card.

App Load Speeds
We launched the Associated Press application at the exact samet time on both phones, then counted until the full News page loaded.This test should have measured both of the device’s ability to launch and application and then download the content inside.  The iPhone 3G S finished in just 3.2 seconds while the iPhone 3G took a full 13 seconds to completely load the application. By those results, the iPhone 3G S is about 75.4 percent faster than the 3G.

Check out our video below for the in-office results of our tests.