Apple have upgraded a number of the internals in the latest iPhone release, including the camera, the lens system, the processor, and a new dual band, intelligent switching antenna design supporting HSPA+ .

In theory, the new phone supports a theoretical maximum download speed of up to 14.4 Mbps. This is a pretty insane speed for a mobile device, if your network even supports it, and if it is available in your area. To give you a comparison, my fixed line broadband connection at home only goes so far as 8Mbps downlink maximum, but normally averages out at about 3-4Mbps in reality (Eircom).

My current mobile provider is 3 Ireland, which is known to have rolled out HSPA+ on certain parts of its network.

So I decided to run a simple test, using the SpeedTest.net app, to test the data speeds on the iPhone 4 and on the iPhone 4S at the same location (in Galway) around the same time of the day. All background apps are closed and wifi is disabled. Here are the findings:

The full nitty gritty details can be viewed here.

Basically, I ran 38 speed tests on each device, averaged them out, and compared the results.

So it looks like we can get vastly faster speeds with the 4S. It’s hard to know if that’s the HSPA+ kicking in, or is it because of the dual core A5 power making everything faster overall? What do you think? I’d be interested in your comments.

Either way, I’m getting about the same speeds now on my mobile as on my fixed line broadband. Time to ditch Eircom and go Personal Hotspot full time? That idea is beginning to become plausible.