3G vs Edge

Anandtech has an interesting post regarding 3G vs Edge on the iPhone and Samsung Blackjack. The basic premise of this post is to test out Steve Job's claim that the iPhone does not support 3G due to battery life issues. The iPhone instead only supports the much slower Edge network as well as Wi-Fi. The article goes on to measure the battery life of a Samsung Blackjack using 3G vs one using EDGE. The results show a big drain in battery life for a Blackjack using 3G. The difference is a 25% drop in battery life when web surfing or checking email, and a big drop of 53% for talk time.

While this does indeed prove that the current 3G chip implementations are power hungry I do not agree with the final conclusion that not supporting 3G was a good decision. The problem is that the EDGE network is very slow. In fact 3G is ten times faster (100kps vs 1Mbps). This makes using the EDGE network so slow that it is impractical to do much in the way of web browsing before you get frustrated. Additionally tethering the Blackjack to your laptop under 3G gives you a fast wireless modem anywhere you can get a connection. I would not even bother doing this under the EDGE network. The iPhone does support Wi-Fi but this is currently impractical to me since it is very rare to find a free public Wi-Fi spot when traveling.

For me the ideal solution is to continue to use 3G when I want to browse the Internet quickly or when I am not worried about battery life (for example when I am not traveling) and then to just switch over to EDGE network when I need to conserve my battery. Thanks to how easy this is to setup to switch between the two networks (using this trick) I can do this whenever I want. I get the best of both worlds, decent battery life and a fast data connection when I need it.