speed

Sprint Nextel may want to have another look at how Apple's iPhone operates on its network.

Enthusiast site AppleInsider conducted a test of how well the iPhone performed on the three main U.S. carrier networks. For AT&T and Verizon Wireless, the results weren't surprising: if you want speed, go with AT&T; for reliability, choose Verizon. That largely backs up their respective claims for the iPhone.

But AppleInsider found connection and speed issues with the Sprint iPhone, echoing some of the complaints from its customers. In particular, the speed of the network has been … Read more

There's more than one way to speed up a slow PC. For instance, you can upgrade your hardware by adding more RAM or a faster hard disk. You can remove a lot of your programs or reinstall Windows entirely. Or you can try a program like SpeedItup Free, a free tool for tweaking, cleaning, and boosting PCs, especially older and slower units. It works automatically in the background to recover memory resources, clean system caches, and erase browsing traces. Its Super Defrag tool is supposed to optimize hard disks, improving performance by up to 150 percent, according to its … Read more

A new study comparing the 3 U.S. iPhone carriers shows that AT&T is tops for data and browsing, more than doubling the download speeds offered by Verizon and Sprint.

While the data speed news does not come as too much of a shock for many who follow the mobile phone industry, it is interesting to note that the iPhone also reported better-than-expected call quality and reliability on AT&T's network. The study, performed by wireless communications analysts Metrico, shows that AT&T's call failure rate sits at 2.8 percent, slightly higher than … Read more

The physics surprise that rattled scientists in September--neutrinos seemingly traveling faster than the speed of light--has withstood one attempt by researchers to poke a hole in their own findings.

Earlier this year, the researchers clocked the subatomic particles traveling through the Earth from the CERN particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, to Italy's INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory 730 kilometers away. The result, if it holds up under scrutiny, challenges a core physics belief established by Albert Einstein that nothing can travel faster than light.

The new experiment used shorter bursts of neutrinos for more precise measurements, and it … Read more

Sugestron Speed Dial is a free Firefox add-on that lets users quickly return to any of their eight most frequently used Web sites. That's nothing new, you say, but Speed Dial also examines browser tabs and other non-Web locations, and it works automatically by analyzing your browsing habits. You can open pages with keystrokes, pin pages into position, and remove them quickly from the Speed Dial browser tab.

Speed Dial downloads, installs, and configures like any Firefox add-on. We opened the add-ons manager and clicked Speed Dial's More link, which took us to its program page. The page … Read more

The iPhone 4S on Verizon offered a good balance between call quality and data speeds during travels in California.

Question: Which is more important, call quality or data speeds? Let me state my bias up front: The Web running on 3G is really important to me. On any device. Whether it's a MacBook connected to a MiFi hot spot, a 3G iPad 2, or an iPhone. That said, is it important enough to justify sacrificing voice call quality?

This week I spent a lot of my time obsessing about the Web performance of my new Verizon iPhone 4S during … Read more

Opera Mini 6.5 brings this version of the alternative browser to iOS devices (version 6.5 has been available for Android for three weeks at the time of this review). We have had a chance to put the slimmed-down browser through its paces and it offers several features we think users will like. With the right tweaks, it may even become the favorite over Apple's Safari--if people are willing to give it a try.

The clean, elegant interface hides multiple useful features, with only five buttons to choose from, along with the address bar and search box. The … Read more

Glaryutilities' Disk SpeedUp is a free standalone utility that analyzes, defragments, and optimizes your disk drives or individual folders. It offers manual and automatic defrag options as well as automatic shutdown after defragmenting finishes.

Like many system utilities, Disk SpeedUp has a colorful interface with large, clearly labeled buttons and tabs labeled Defrag Show and Settings. The Defrag Show tab showed our two disk drives and their capacity, free space, status, and percentage of fragmentation. In the middle was a standard defrag map, while at the bottom of the interface, Disk SpeedUp displayed tabs with our three partitions, each with … Read more

Sprint and Apple are said to be working on a possible software fix for slower-than-expected wireless networking speeds affecting some users of Apple's latest iPhone.

The issue has been the topic of a now 60-page support discussion thread on Sprint's site that began the day the phone was launched. There, users have been complaining of slow 3G speeds and posting photos of speed tests, including ones showing differing handsets to suggest the problem is limited to Apple's recently launched iPhone 4S hardware.

The Next Web today points to an alleged internal memo making the rounds to Sprint representatives saying that both Sprint and Apple are both aware of, and working on, a fix, suggesting the problem could be software-related. … Read more