I wrote earlier on the paradoxical benchmark results showing that Edge connections beats Wifi on the new 8320 Curve. I’m in the market for a new phone and data plan, so this is of more than academic interest to me.

Further research reveals possible sources of the problem and workarounds. 

First, users consistently report (see here and here and here for instance) that wifi speed on the 8820 is consistently better than on the 8320 and better than EDGE. 

Why the difference?

Many have speculated that the processor on the 8320 lacks the speed to fully exploit WIFI and/or the OS has bottlenecks/bugs.   For example, engadget writes:

The Curve is armed with a 312MHz Intel processor which seems to under-power the device, especially during times of intense multitasking. In addition, while using WiFi to browse the internet, we experienced bottleneck issues with page loading times. Time and time again, the 8320 using WiFi was slower that the 8800 using T-Mobile’s EDGE network. With all things being equal, the loading time was approximately three seconds quicker on the 8800. Coincidence? Doubt it.

However, the 8820 is also running a 312 Mhz processor, so it’s not clear this explanation is complete.

Blackberry Forums also reports that by default all Wifi traffic on the 8320 is proxied through slow blackberry.net servers, and that much better results can be obtained by forcing the 8320 to be wifi only.

Some mystery remains, but the short summary appears to be that you’re much better going with the 8820 than 8320. You’ll give up the camera, but in return you’ll get GPS and better wifi speeds.