Recently I had the opportunity to put the recently released Motorola Droid head to head with an Apple iPhone 3gs. Because of the location, the iPhone was on the edge network, while the Droid was on a full speed 3g network. Testing out each phone, I ran a few different tests to compare, and realized how slow edge network really is compared to 3g. I put each phone through the paces, and have to say overall the Verizon 3g network was very impressive. What I realized is that not everyone is on a high speed 3g network, and there is no real safe way to detect on the server side the connection type for a user. This means it is important to provide the best quality experience while maintaining the solid optimized content for those who may be on a slower network.

The average download speed for the US is pretty dam fast, where not compared to Japan, but still over 5 megabit per second. The chart is over 2 years old, so we can only assume the speeds have increased.

Now compare that with these speeds for typical mobile phone bandwidths:

	alltime	today
GPRS	39 kbps / 1410 ms 83 samples	48 kbps / 846 ms 3 samples
EDGE	122 kbps / 944 ms 1831 samples	136 kbps / 805 ms 34 samples
3G	671 kbps / 435 ms 12040 samples	628 kbps / 460 ms 526 samples
Wifi	2340 kbps / 135 ms 1062 samples	2014 kbps / 130 ms 32 samples

results from http://i.dslr.net/iphone_speedtest.html

Examining these results, it is easy to see why it is critical to compact images, and content to generate a very zippy page. Lets exam a few popular mobile sites, and see how well they perform on edge or 3g bandwidth connections.

For those sites which are designed for mobile devices, such as Nokia N70, Samsung z105, Motorola v3i, check out this great resource:

http://ready.mobi/

Here is a screenshot of a report on an undisclosed popular mobile site:

Once you have run the report, and have an idea what your site loading times are like, you may want to know what you can do to improve the results. Here are 3 great resources to help you speed up your mobile site:

1. Yahoo! YSlow + Firebug Firefox addon + Yahoo Developer Network Blog Post
2. Google Speed Tools
3. Pingdom Web based Speed Test
4. WebSiteOptimization.com

Yahoo Developer Tools

YSlow analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance based on a set of rules for high performance web pages. YSlow is a Firefox add-on integrated with the Firebug web development tool. YSlow grades web page based on one of three predefined ruleset or a user-defined ruleset.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast. The list includes 34 best practices divided into 7 categories.

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Google Speed Tools

Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

For firefox: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux).

For Chrome: http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/speedtracer/

Pingdom Web based Speed Tools

The Full Page Test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

http://tools.pingdom.com/

Here is a screenshot from a sample report on Pingdom:

Website Optimization.com Tools

Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates the latest best practices from Website Optimization Secrets, web page size guidelines and trends, and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.

http://analyze.websiteoptimization.com/wso

Here is a screenshot of a report on WSO: (this is only a portion of the results, try out the tool to generate a full set of results)