Akamai released their quarterly State of the Internet report this week, along with this chart showing the fastest national networks in the world. From 2008 to 2009, on average, the world’s internet got 13% faster. America’s got 2.4% slower. There are tons of interesting tidbits to be found in Akamai’s State of the Internet report for Q3 2009.

CNET have taken the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and Snow Leopard for a spin around a 2008 MacBook Pro , and produced a decent first peek at comparative performance. Of course, there are significant provisos to get through first — it’s only one machine, running on Apple’s drivers, testing mostly Apple applications, and the two systems default to different versions of QuickTime — but we can still glean some indication of where the two heavyweights are relative to one another. Snow Leopard appeared consistently quicker in time-based tests, with faster bootups, shutdowns and MP3 encoding, but Windows 7 showed its muscle in producing better frame rates in games and a significant advantage in Cinebench rendering. Battery life was found to be distinctly better under Snow Leopard, but we’d put that down to the underlying hardware being optimized for OS X. Hit the read link for the full testing procedures and more of those old school bar charts — it should get you well prepped for the forthcoming flood of similar head-to-heads once WIndows 7 officially ships next week.

Thanks to all our Chicago readers who sent in their speed test data from their iPhone 3G and 3GS. Here’s our conclusion: the 7.2Mbps AT&T’s testing in Chicago doesn’t really make any difference right now in speeds. The 3GS turned out to be slightly faster in downloads (1202kbps vs. 1161kbps), but just about the same in uploads.

Now that we know the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre share extremely similar 65nm ARM Cortex A8-based internals , it’s time to break out the stopwatches and see how these blood brothers stack up. Anandtech has the first head-to-head tests we’ve seen, and it seems like the 3G S has the slight edge, loading a series of web pages 11 percent faster and a whopping 54 percent faster than the iPhone 3G. Not too shabby, but not exactly a thorough drubbing either — especially when you consider webOS is still 1.0 and there’s likely some optimizations to come. Full results at the read link. Update: Anandtech had some uncharacteristically bad math going on — the 3G S is actually 21 percent faster than the Pre, which is actually quite notable considering the similar hardware and WebKit-based browsers.

Hey Chicago iPhone 3G and 3GS users. Want to help us out? Download the Speedtest app for your iPhone, and run it. Why Chicago? Because AT&T’s been testing 7.2Mbps there. Just download the app, run the test, and take a screenshot (home and power buttons).