Despite all best intentions, my fraile will power was toppled last night as I purchased an iPhone. After standing in line for over 2 hours, I snatched up what I believed was one of the last 4GB on the planet (articles this morning are pointing to an abundance of iPhone stock at Apple stores….feeling a little like an iSchmuck). That said, my first impressions…..amazing! It exceeds almost every expectation save one: the EDGE network.

Now, I knew going into this that EDGE was a little slower (I had previously been on Verizon’s EVDO network, and was used to downloading videos at high speeds), but what surprised me how slow webpages were to load. Thinking about this further made me realize that my slow-load shock orginated from two sources:

1. EDGE is just slower network
2. I had never downloaded a regular webpage before. Rendering a page such as Yahoo.com would have looked terrible on my Motorola Q, so I naturally gravitated toward the mobile-friendly pages like http://m.yahoo.com. In fact, it was a desire to locate new mobile-friendly sites that lead me to develop Tappity.com.

How slow is slow?

In the example above, I listed Yahoo.com as one of the web pages that I found to load incredibly slowly. But what does that mean: how slow is slow?

On average, Yahoo.com took 30 seconds to load on the iPhone. Yahoo’s mobile site: 4 seconds.

But that’s just Yahoo right? I mean, it could be their servers or a number of other factors, right? Absolutely, I’m a scientist just like the next guy. Let’s take a look at some other site comparisons, shall we?

New York Times
Regular: 45 seconds
Mobile (mobile.nytimes.com): 9 seconds

Digg
Regular: 60 seconds
Mobile (DiggRiver.com): 6 seconds

Twitter
Regular: 12 seconds
Mobile (m.twitter.com): 4 seconds

Pretty significant differences, eh? Sure, but the argument against it is: you’re getting more visual information on the regular sites rather than the stripped down version that you get via the mobile site. Absolutely, but isn’t that the point: isn’t the extra visual info extraneous?

The retrieval of information from the Internet has always been, at its core, about matching the amount of data to the available bandwidth. Think 1999…..it’s not that the technology didn’t exist to deliver high-quality, image-intesive websites; the standard for Internet access during those days was a dial-up modem. It would’ve been unthinkable to create a 250-350K page back them. It wasn’t until the widespread availability of broadband connections that we upped the acceptable size of a webpage (though, a well-founded argument could me made that those are still too big). So why try to do that with a mobile phone? Why try to squeeze a watermelon through a garden hose when you’re still putting the melon on a small plate at the other end? (Sorry, that analogy seem really good when I was starting the sentence.)

There are thousands of mobile-friendly sites out there that provide all of the content of their regular counterparts, without all the visual fluff. Using these sites doesn’t detract from the beauty of the iPhone’s interface, nor does it negate all of the hard work that Apple engineers put into Safari and the “pinch” effect. In fact, using mobile-friendly websites makes the iPhone experience even better. For one, the pages load quicker, not to mention the fact that it’s easier to pinch on a non-cluttered page.  I highy recommend that both iPhone and non-iPhone users alike try the page comparisons above and see which you find a more enjoyable mobile experience.  Feel free to comment below on further examples of load time differences.

To discover mobile-friendly sites, like those listed in the article and hundreds of others, visit Tappity.com today.

Sure, we’re excited for the iPhone. I mean, who isn’t? You gotta be some sort of technology-hating freak sauce not to be excited for only the most bestest phone ever to be launched ever, right?

We here, at Tappity, just got done watching the 20-some-minute video on Apple’s website. You know what I’m talking about, the one that makes you look at your phone as if it were a discarded corn cob. I have to be honest, I started thinking of ways to scrape together $500, and envisioned myself there on launch day, at the Apple Store, elbowing yuppies out of my way like my father did so many years ago, trying to get my sister a Cabbage Patch Doll. But then…then, I remembered something…..each one of us already has an iPhone…..inside of us….well, inside of our phones, that is….

That’s right folks, aside from the whiz-bang graphics and drool-inducing transitions, it’s likely that your current phone has access to as much, if not more, information than the yet-to-be-released, impossible-to-get-when-it-comes-out, gonna-cost-you-an-arm-and-two-legs-to-purchase, not-to-mention-youre-stuck-in-a-contract iPhone. All you need is a phone with a web browser…..oh, and Tappity…..

What kind of things can I find with my current cell phone, which up until a minute ago I thought was pooptastic?

I’m glad you asked. You can access: Yahoo, Google, maps, directions, weather, sports, price comparison, used car pricing, Flickr, video, news, movie showtimes, Digg, and a whole lot more.

Tappity is a site that helps you discover that all of these features have existed on the mobile web, long before the iPhone. Once you find sites that are of interest to you, use Tappity to create a personalized mobile homepage, so that you can access them quickly.

Sign up today!