I have a 3G laptop card and an iPhone. The laptop card works great in less dense areas. When I even get near downtown Chicago I have full bars of signal strength and really slow page loading. This same thing happens with the iPhone. My point is that it isn't the devices that are the problem; it's the network. Anecdotally, I started to notice the degradation on my laptop card in the Summer of '08.

Java web start is the first thing that I thought of when I saw the "The Best of Both Worlds" chart in the article. I guess the difference is the programming language used to implement the application.