GPRS and EDGE might be far far away from current throughput speeds, but when looking more closely, it's evolution is also quite interesting and remarkable: When looking back 5 years or so, GPRS round trip delay times were around 900 ms for subsequent pings and 1200 ms for the first ping. Together with the relatively low overall speed, it took quite long for even small web pages to show up on my mobile device. Things have changed in the meantime, though:
These days, with EDGE data rates, one phase access, Extended TBF Uplink, continued TBF in downlink and pre-establishment of downlink resources when transferring something in the uplink, round trip delay times have come down to less than 200 ms for subsequent pings. In addition, I have noticed that in many networks, Network Assisted Cell Change (NACC) is now used for cell changes to minimize the interruption during cell updates when transferring data while being mobile. With OperaMini for example, that makes web access incredibly quick.
In retrospect, I am quite amazed how much these features have helped with the mobile browsing experience!