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Just in case you didn't notice - you can always write to the Data Protection Officer for each of the companies that provide those cards to get a copy of every bit of information they hold on you. They mustn't return it in any kind of coded form. And you can legally challenge any of that information if its invalid.

I had to do this to get Hutchison 3 to remove various bits of crap off my credit record. Worked fine. Shame they suck so much I had to that though...

320 x 240 hi resolution

How is this "hi resolution"? My mobile phone has almost got higher resolution.

Soon?

In English, try Three UK.

It doesn't help that the only consumer-level 3G service in the UK, Three, only offer a walled garden of content, and don't even permit data calls. No data calls? Even my old Cellnet PAYG SIM allowed me to do that (at a price).

I have a video phone. My sister has a video phone. I sell them for a living. Hutchison 3G (3) run a 3G network with realtime video calls as well as video clip downloads.

Most digital music players won't touch the things...

Maybe you need a newer player -- even my cell phone plays AAC's.

In Britain, all four providers use GSM.

I don't have one, but three have been selling video mobiles (using 3G for bandwidth) for a while now in the UK. NTT have been doing so for a lot longer in Japan AFAIK.

three have done a deal with Playboy TV IIRC...

In England we have Videophones
In Japan they have Cars that drive themselves
And the french have a Moving Sidewalk

Three do this, just like the man said.

videophones have been around for a while in the UK and in other countries(seems to be broken?). The quality still isn't brilliant but Orange(I think) have started to offer Soccer highlights over the latest phones.

moon colonies, ok, we chose to put a space station up there first, and then realised it costs a lot of money for little (commercial or military) value. Moon colonies are sadly not as sexy as say a Mars colony, or even a Mars mission, which ESA has planned in 25 years, NASA tried and continues to test methods of producing enough food,air and water, other countries,notably India and China have planned Moon landings so we are going back. Space is unfortunately used as a pissing contest between nuclear neighbours, when this stops then some more science can get done(e.g. Hubble, Galileo, Beagle 2)

food in pills. You can get food in pills, just not the calories, vitamins will give you nearly all of the trace elements you need to live. Calories are a lot harder, to get 500 Calories into a pill means eating something with 40 times the energy concentration of sugar or twenty times the concentration of fats, I doubt the human body would have much success digesting such complicated food. You can however get protein and creatine supplements which are in tablet/powder form, and sugar sweets( those silly energy sweets which taste of really sour orange) have more calories than their equivalent weight in sugar. (The protein supplements also tend to taste bad and are fed to animals instead. )

cars that drive themselves; power steering has been around for a while, as has ABS and cruise control, that is about as much as the current laws will allow on the public roads. intelligent cars have been developed, which, when combined with other intelligent cars, are actually safe. It's the human drivers who freak out at the sight of a driverless car that's the problem :-)

jet packs; Jet packs appeared in Thunderball (James Bond). You can buy them if you have enough money, or you can build them if you want. They're not used much because, much like the Segway, there are easier and cheaper way of getting around.

moving sidewalk's are in most airports now, as well as some metro stations. There have also been "moving stairs" around for just as long.

This post brought to you by Google.com, paid for by Google For America, Inc.

The first mobile videophones are already on sale and in use. We're not quite there with the flying cars yet, though.

as cell companies realize that their mixed systems of digital phonecalls and data can be much better, and more economically managed in a Voice-over-IP infrastructure.

3G is VoIP

with the major telcos providing national and regional backbone networks,

That's what they are doing in 3G

So 3G won't die, and 802.11 will live. They are two different things anyway :-)

I've found that (in the case of '3', the UKs first 3G supplier to the market) they are provinding the extra features INSTEAD of a data link to the web - after announcing a large price reduction I had a look around their web site for data tariffs and found none - after a call to their customer services center, I was told that you could not get internet access.

All three of the available phones support JAVA and a web browser (from what I can gather looking at the online manuals [PDF] ), but instead they have decided to get rid of the one thing I would use and replaced it with a naff list of services.

I can't blame them really - charging for services is how they are going to get a large portion of their investment back. But I'm dissapointed.

Interesting thing is though - they support the reading of emails from 'your ISPs' POP3 account, so its not as though they don't have a problem transferring data across their network. If you could upload a port mapping JAVA app to the phone via the data-link cable you *might* be able to get to another (reverse) port mapper running on your xDSL line (ie 80 -> 25....25 -> 80).... till someone found out :)

Steve.

I've found that (in the case of '3', the UKs first 3G supplier to the market) they are provinding the extra features INSTEAD of a data link to the web - after announcing a large price reduction I had a look around their web site for data tariffs and found none - after a call to their customer services center, I was told that you could not get internet access.

All three of the available phones support JAVA and a web browser (from what I can gather looking at the online manuals [PDF] ), but instead they have decided to get rid of the one thing I would use and replaced it with a naff list of services.

I can't blame them really - charging for services is how they are going to get a large portion of their investment back. But I'm dissapointed.

Interesting thing is though - they support the reading of emails from 'your ISPs' POP3 account, so its not as though they don't have a problem transferring data across their network. If you could upload a port mapping JAVA app to the phone via the data-link cable you *might* be able to get to another (reverse) port mapper running on your xDSL line (ie 80 -> 25....25 -> 80).... till someone found out :)

Steve.

I've found that (in the case of '3', the UKs first 3G supplier to the market) they are provinding the extra features INSTEAD of a data link to the web - after announcing a large price reduction I had a look around their web site for data tariffs and found none - after a call to their customer services center, I was told that you could not get internet access.

All three of the available phones support JAVA and a web browser (from what I can gather looking at the online manuals [PDF] ), but instead they have decided to get rid of the one thing I would use and replaced it with a naff list of services.

I can't blame them really - charging for services is how they are going to get a large portion of their investment back. But I'm dissapointed.

Interesting thing is though - they support the reading of emails from 'your ISPs' POP3 account, so its not as though they don't have a problem transferring data across their network. If you could upload a port mapping JAVA app to the phone via the data-link cable you *might* be able to get to another (reverse) port mapper running on your xDSL line (ie 80 -> 25....25 -> 80).... till someone found out :)

Steve.

"Will we soon be able to download music or videos on our cell phones?"

Us Brits (ok I am welsh really!) have been able to do this already. Three a mobile company here in the UK has been selling handsets and access for a while that provides music/maps/video downloads and calls.

"In Europe, we are now using GPRS, or general packet radio service, also known as 2.5G. And we are limited to 30 kilobits a second."

Note this bloke is from france which is in europe, but a backwater in most things! ;)

Note that the testbed for the DoComo handsets is in Cambridge...UK.

All together now... God save our gracious queen....

Yes, GSM is more widely supported than CDMA, but note that the GSM folks are having a heck of a time providing 3G support, whereas the two big CDMA providers in the states (Verizon and Sprint) have both rolled out huge 3G networks.

What you're missing is that what the CDMA carriers are calling 3G actually isn't. In Europe we call it 2.5G, and all our networks have already rolled out phones that handle that sort of stuff, the fact that the US carriers haven't just means that (as usual) they're behind the curve.

If you want a look at real 3G network, the first UK one just rolled out, see three.co.uk. The most obvious feature that doesn't turn up under 2.5G is real person to person video calling, quality seems to be fairly good as well.

Maybe a little offtopic but 3 are already advertising a mobile videophone 3G service on TV in the UK. I don't believe the videophone service is ready to go yet but by the looks of it most of the infrastructure is in place and you can already buy the phones and voice service.

It's not cheap though.

I would think that having UT2003 projected onto your retinas anywhere you like is a recipe for disaster!

Some... impressionable types might find it even harder to divorce reality from virtuality. Imagine people massacring scores of 'n00bs' before attempting a rocket jump only to realise that they are in real life and have no legs left.

Ona side note, I should be getting my three 3G mobile fone next week (my partner works for three) and am looking forward to seeing just how the downlaod speeds measure up to the hype

The kinds of services that are noted in this post are not new. Check out http://www.three.co.uk/explore/services3/detailLoc ate.omp, This page talks about the offerings of a 3G company in the UK called 3. The location services offered allows the phone user to find services/places, get directions, locate loved ones, etc. This technology is invaluable alone as a method for finding the location of someone in trouble who is not tied to a physical location as with a land line. I know one of the companies working on location technology, TeleCommunications Systems Inc. offers a privacy component that can be used to make sure the company does not misuse the data they have.

Well he says that he can get 12-18Kb/s per second on GPRS. Well thats not bad but here in the UK its just not worth doing. We are billed on a per Kb cost. To download a 1MB can pay upto US$8. Also the latency sucks so SSH over GPRS isn't the most friendly expierence in the world.

However we have just had Three lauch which should provide real 3G services. Now that should be cool. I can't wait to have to make sure my hair is neat when I answer a video call

Rus

Hutchison Telecom, the people who originally set up the Orange mobile phone network in the UK and, I think, Holland, launched their UK-wide 3G network under the freakishly-logoed '3' brand this month. Check www.three.co.uk for details.

Anyone got a clue what they're thinking with that logo?

In Europe, "3G" (third generation) technologies were supposed to transform the economy, turning cell phones into mini-entertainment centers, but reality failed to live up to the hype.

Its difficult to say that '3G' or UMTS to be exact has failed in Europe, as most have not yet launched due to the financial strife in the telecoms sector limiting investment into the new infrastructure. In fact Hutchinson's Three (UK's first UMTS network) will be going live soon

Granted this pressure has resulted in GPRS '2.5G' becoming more widely adopted, and this can provide many of the benefits of UMTS as far as the user is concerned such as reasonable speed mobile data access, whilst being a step upgrade to the GSM netwrok so cheaper to role out and not needing thousands of new masts (UMTS needs masts in different physical locations as it uses a different radio system - see later)

In this respect Europe is in a more fortunate than the US as GSM digital cellular networks have become the standard, so the upgrade to GPRS is a logical one.

The growing interest in EvDO adds to the momentum of Qualcomm's CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) standard that is now used by some of the largest wireless companies, including Verizon and Sprint Corp

This is a strange tack to take, given the dismisal of '3G' as a failure a few lines before.

In Europe the new standard chosen to replace GSM was UMTS, which is based on a CDMA radio sub system. This is a spread spectrum method which brings many benefits, but means you need new masts as the radio coverage is different.

In the US you have Qualcomm's CDMA 2000 system which will evolve into the W-CDMA standard

In practical aspect these are equivalent systems, at least as far as the radio engineering goes - the differences mainly being in how the networks are run and how data is transfered, the underlying carrier technology is very similar, and infact most of the equipment is the same, differing only in the management systems.

So in Europe the delayed roll out of UMTS can be seen really as a factor of the depressed state of the telecoms market, and the fact that the cheaper to roll out GSM based GPRS system gives you high speed data access.

In the US there is no easy upgrade from an existing network as GSM didn't make much of an inroad and the better range in fringe areas of analogue systems like TACS is more suitable to the larger country.

Realistically the only way for the major equipment providers to realise the return on investment of thier CDMA technology is to go after the one thing the alternatives don't do well, the domain of large scale wireless data access.