Cingular vs. Sprint – HSDPA vs. EDVO
I’ve been doing a lot of research lately after my HTC 8125 broke, but it came back to life about a week later.
Since my HTC 8125 is so slow, I had to find a new phone that was FAST. I went to all the stores with demo phones including Cingular, Verizon, Sprint, and didn’t really bother going to T-mobile. Anyways, some of the Cingular stores had these HTC 8525 demos hooked up on Wi-fi so I thought it was really fast until I turned the Wifi off.
After going to all these stores, I found Sprint and Verizon had the fastest internet. (As far as simply bringing up a big site like Make on the phone)
What’s HSDPA and EDVO?
HSDPA is basically the data internet network for GSM phones (Cingular, T-Mobile) and EDVO is the one for CDMA phones. (Sprint, Verizon)
I am really looking forward to WiMAX, which is a network running on CDMA and supposedly is faster than your DSL or cable.
Browsing Tests
My current HTC 8125 on Cingular takes about 2 minutes.
Verizon took about 30 seconds and Sprint was slightly faster at about 20 seconds.
Then I went to the Cingular store and tested their HSDPA enabled HTC 8525 phone which took about 1 minute and a half to load up Makezine.
Well, this is all great, but where is the proof?
So, I found a cool site that tests your cellphone speed. I checked out the Cingular store and the Sprint store again.
Although I wanted to switch to Sprint, I wanted to do a last check for the fastest phone.
Here’s the results:
Cingular HTC 8125:
400 K bits/sec
Cingular Samsung Blackjack:
830K bits/sec
Sprint PPC-6700
1100K bits/sec
I wanted to test the Motorola-Q too at the Sprint store but maybe next time…
Actually, the Sprint PPC-6700 flutuated between 500K bits/sec to 1600K bits/sec
Overall, when browsing sites, the Sprint PPC-6700 loaded faster whereas the Cingular phones loaded very slowly regardless of the speed test.
If you are going to go with Cingular, make sure to get the HTC8525, which is the only phone that supports HSDPA. Actually maybe Blackjack does too…
I will update you on some results after my new Sprint phone purchases. (We are gettin’ the Moto Q and the Samsung IP-830W for some rugged testing…)
Also expect EDVO Rev B to boost some EDVO enabled phones… (Sprint, Verizon) Up to 9Mbps downloads!
[...] test results shows us that there is really no difference in the phone but the network. Cingular is definitely slow on even with HSDPA. I am just glad I don’t have to use the 8125 anymore, maybe I will offer it for freebie if [...]
I just ran this test with a 8525 from AT&T(Cingular) from Las Vegas and I got 1632K bits/sec.
So either you are in a location that currently doesn’t support AT&T 3G or you had a bad phone.
My first 8525 only got 200Kbps, but after they replaced the SIM card, the speed has been fantastic, also, the newly AT&T brand 8525’s are even better.
So you may want to retry that test again and verifiy that the “demo” phone is actually in “testing” shape.
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I think that is the problem. AT&T’s 3G is not available everywhere although I am in the heart of San Francisco… You only get the fast speed if you are lucky basically…
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Im gonna try that test on my phone
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[...] Heck, I did a lot of testing over at our dot com blog when 3G was out about a year ago. [...]
Thanks man, just what I was looking for. Worked like a charm Thanks so much…
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