Not criticizing, just mentioning ...

> I was down to 3G, it seemed like dialup speeds.

Sounds like first-world problems! :)

HN works great on my EDGE (2G) Blackberry 8700g (2006) with Opera in SF. Handy on the Muni. Basically no other site is usable at this point unless it's HTML-only.

However, I understand that telcos are attempting to not support 2G any longer, so don't plan on that working much longer. T-mobile still has fairly good urban EDGE coverage, except for SF FiDi.

> I couldn't get any other site to load. Not even google.com.

The google UI appears minimal, but they're loading a ton of javascript.