Android phones like Sony Ericsson Xperia Acro S and Xperia S, Samsung Galaxy Xcover & S Plus, LG Optimus L7, Nokia X, ZTE Blade III, Huawei Ideos X5 or HTC Desire S or Android Tablets like Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 were among the slowest mobile devices today, according to a research report.
A lot of users are using outdated mobile devices that fail to reach adequate speeds on mobile networks, according to measurements shared by the users of Netradar, a free mobile application that measures mobile connections & devices.
The Netradar application is developed & run globally by Aalto University in Finland. Click here for the full list of the 150 most popular smartphones & Tablets & their average and median top 10 maximum download speeds.
According to the report, the iPhone 4 & iPad 2 were “clearly slower than newer Apple devices” & often contribute to the speed bottleneck. Out of the most popular smartphones based on the Windows Phone, the Nokia 610 and ZTE Tania were found to have very limited download speeds. Old Symbian phones were also limited in performance.
At the moment, the research team said, the mobile device market was “very polarized”. Out of the 150 most commonly used mobile phones, half were 4G/LTE devices that could reach at least 95 Mbit download speeds over mobile networks. Yet, about one fourth of the popular devices could not reach 10 Mbit. A 10 Mbit download speed enables reasonably fast Internet services & smooth HD video streams. The remaining one fourth can give up to 20 Mbit download speeds, the upper limit of 3G networks.
”Quite often ordinary smartphone users fail to reach proper speeds. A device that was bought and considered fast few years ago, but also brand new devices, can contribute to the speed bottleneck. People often expect that it is the operator’s fault if the Internet connection is bad, but the device can also be the problem”, says Professor Jukka Manner, who leads the Netradar development team at Aalto University in Finland.
“If a consumer wants to use fast mobile Internet, almost any LTE device is up to the job, provided that LTE is available in the area and there is no speed limitation in the data plan. The fastest mobile Internet speeds are all achieved using LTE”, he added.
The results were based on speed measurements shared by mobile phone users using Netradar, a free mobile application to measure mobile connections and devices, available for all smart phones and Tablets. While using the application, users were presented with data about the quality of their connectivity. Simultaneously, this data was uploaded anonymously to the Netradar database.
The free Netradar app measures devices & mobile network quality in terms of download & upload speed, latency & signal strength, network problems & the performance of individual brands of smartphones & Tablets.
For those interested, they can download the Netradar app for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Nokia X, Meego, Symbian & Jolla/Sailfish. Maps of mobile Internet speeds measured all around the world are displayed at www.netradar.org Netradar mobile network maps can also be viewed at http://www.internetsociety.org/netradar.
So far, the Netradar app has been installed over 220,000 times. The database currently holds almost 6 million measurements from all around the globe.
You may also like to read: Denmark, Singapore, Switzerland, Norway & South Korea have the fastest Internet connections
Image Credit: Netradar
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