In Australia the other day a Canadian company called Datawind staged a competition between its handheld device and the iPhone. The contest would see which device can download email the fastest and Datawind’s PocketSurfer2 won!

A Canadian company called DataWind wants its PocketSurfer2 to be the Internet device of choice down in Australia. The device looks like a mini notebook computer and presents the real web, showing the whole web page not just a mobile version. It was actually doing this before iPhone was released.

To bring attention to its Australian launch Datawind staged this download competition and beat iPhone. Of course, nobody ever said iPhone was a speed demon on its EDGE line but it is the most high profile portable device out there today.

PocketSurfer2 connects using GPRS an older wireless technology based on GSM that’s capable of 170 Kbps. iPhone uses EDGE which is newer and faster, capable of peaks of over 300Kbps.

 

 

 

So, how is it possible an EDGE device was beaten by a GPRS device? Do you really care?

Datawind has a special sauce in its download acceleration technology. Datawind says it’ll take seven seconds to download most pages. In the contest with iPhone PocketSurfer2 downloaded an eBay page in seven seconds while it took the iPhone four minutes.

Different approach to downloading

The technology is a departure from most digital mobile devices. When the user requests a download the device connects to Datawind servers in Canada via GPRS. Then the server does the browsing for you, downloads the pages, compresses it and sends it back to your device. The result is faster browsing than most mobile devices despite the slow connection speeds. That’s fine for downloading web-pages and email, but you can’t stream video this way.

Don’t go looking for the device in North America just yet. It’s only available in the UK, Germany and now Australia.

IPhone Info December 6th, 2007 Howie Posted in iPhone Competitors |