Thursday, February 21, 2008

3G or not 3G

There's an interesting article over at one of my favourite blogs, Palm-Mac where the ever astute Murray is talking about 3G, the fast connection available on a lot of today's mobile devices - or rather he's talking about not having 3G at the top of his "must have" list any longer.

Most people in the technorati still see 3G as a must have, or the device simply isn't up to it. Murray's view, and one that I currently share (maybe because I've never had a 3G device) is that there are some inherent problems with it which often outweigh it's usefulness.

Not least amongst this is that it eats the battery life, and if like a lot of people you don't live or work in a 3G enabled area the constant searching for a 3G signal also affects the battery. Murray's happy in the main he now says with either WIFI or good old GSM networks.

I have a WIFI enabled smartphone, but frankly most often use GPRS even when I'm at home and have WIFI available - but that's because I think I'm not that worried about speed generally, and perhaps more importantly I have an unlimited data plan, so it doesn't matter so much if my data connection isn't the speed of light - it's not costing me any more.

Where I intended this post to go originally was along the lines of ever changing technology demands. A bit of the higher, faster, longer sort of thing, and then realising that higher, faster or longer isn't always the way forward.

Another example of this is that about a year ago several of the blogs I read were espousing non-touchscreen devices as the way forward - non of this messing about with styluses (stylii?) any more, and how Symbian or Windows Mobile Standard Edition was the only way to go.

Now? It's all gone touch screen again. A look at some of the popular "smart" devices out there, and we've got the iPhone (of course), the HTC TyTn II and various other devices all touting the good old touchscreen.

I think I'm beginning to waffle now, but on one final point, I actually got my first look at a real iPhone the other day - in the hand so to speak (actually it wasn't my hand, but a colleague was demonstrating his new toy to me), and I have to say it looked absolutely brilliant. Now all I've got to do is wait for the unlocked version.......

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