Difficult one to call as country and carrier will have big impact. I had to decide between bold and curve and had similar question. I went for Bold not just for 3G reasons. What I found is 3g performance is great in some areas, and very quick. But. In some areas signal is terrible or non existant and I have to switch to 2G which is always slower than best 3G
This is in NE eng on Orange
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So, i stopped. Useing the 3G network because it's not so fast in my area and needs a lot more batterie! Sometimes when i check a video on youtube i change the network but not often
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I haven't used an 8900, but my EDGE 8100 was sloooooooooow to download anything. Google Maps was pretty unusable, which is probably a better indicator of pure download speed than webpages which need to be rendered.
I would say that 3G is substantially faster on device. It's *WAAAAAAAAAAY* faster when tethered.
As most people can tell you, browsing speed is usually bottlenecked by the rendering speed/javascript handling, not the network speed.
Most of the time you aren't transferring a lot of data browsing websites is why. If you add it up loading 100 websites over time that's a different story (particularly if they are non WAP).
Now anything streaming or transferring larger amounts of data, there will be a huge difference...
Worst of all it's really easy to trick yourself into thinking one device is faster than another because there are too many factors (OS revisions, how clean your device is, 3rd party app resource consumption, network conditions, etc, etc). This is why those videos that do a side by side comparison of speeds performing a certain action are basically a waste of space.
It's true that none of the smartphones on the market can really take advantage of 3G speeds because of rendering time. 3G still makes a difference. It's just that the difference is much bigger when tethered or doing a straight download (like an OTA app).