Summary

 It’s not easy being an app tester, you know. So this time around, I thought I would experiment a bit and test two apps at once! Since internet speed testing apps aren’t exactly complex, I thought it would be a nice idea to do a comparison between two of them. Find out what happened to my ambitious plan in today’s exclusive test.

Let me get things straight before I start: besides testing the “Speedtest.net Speed Test” app (Speed Test for short) I also wanted to try out the “Network Speed Test” app. Unfortunately, the latter app came up with a “Failed!” message every time I tried to start it. Therefore I’m forced to just stick to the first one.

As everyone knows smartphone are booming, netbooks have become immensely popular (fun fact: Austria is the country with the most netbooks per capita!) and all these gadgets share one thing in common: they need a reliable internet connection to reach their full potential. This may sound a bit too obvious, but it’s not always easy to surf at high speeds. This things is that mobile internet (3G or HSDPA) can be too slow at times. Whether you’re in a rural location or in a bustling city – people tend to suffer from this problem all over the place.

That’s why it can be interesting to see how fast (or slow) your internet connection really is. With Speed Test you can test the download and upload speeds as well as the ping (determines the distance to the server). Besides these numbers a tachometer is also displayed. The app also includes the server location and provider information. All of this can be found directly on the start screen. Here are some additional options available:

• Settings: Here you can select the speed unit (kbps, Mbps, kB/s) and chance the history order. You can also change the server, but the distances to the server are usually totally off. Finally, you can view the IP address of the device and server.
• Results: Show all results in one list.
• About: Information about Speedtest.net

Speed Test offers you all the functions you could expect from this type of app. Being able to view the data in different speed units is also very useful. It’s a shame that the distances to the servers are so inaccurate. The speed test results, however, are really precise and accurate.

The app has a catchy design, but the graphics on the Milestone(e.g. the tachometer) were a bit fuzzy, especially the About screen (check out the screenshot). They should use higher resolution graphics for this app since there aren’t any complicated 3D graphics. This app would well perform on low-end devices even with better graphics.

Everything is great here! The app is both reliable and fast. It may, however, take a few seconds to get the app started and have the server list updated. The slower the internet connection, the longer it takes for the app to load. Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out

The app is available for free and without any real ads. There is a SPEEDTEST.NET banner displayed on every screen (except for Settings), but I'm not sure if that qualifies as a real ad.