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Hello Kitty May Be Key to 3G Survival

Posted by michael on from the if-you-build-it-they-will-come dept.

wa4osh writes "It's scary to think that sophisticated 3G mobile systems may depend for their survival on Hello Kitty (a cutesy Japanese pink cat with whiskers but no mouth) according to the recent Commdesign article "Hello Kitty may be key to 3G success". The article suggests that 3G's main market is downloading ringtones and backgrounds. Reading between the lines, it also suggests that 3G did not find a killer application. For example, what happened to 3G Video phones, or using 3G to send video clips to each other? These are all things that can be done with today's 2.5G technologies - GPRS and 1XRTT. So what's 3G really for? Perhaps Wi-Fi / 802.11 is solving the real need for broadband data mobility." The Wall Street Journal has an article which suggests that cellular companies are turning to Wi-Fi to hedge their bets.

1 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Dumb conclusion by Fnkmaster · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The killer app for 3G wireless? Well, there are lots of them out there, but letting yourself get coupled to the idea of the cellphone as the correct outlet for them all is retarded. The network should not be usable only by an audio handset device. That's dumb.


    Audio-on-demand. From anywhere you want. THAT will kick ass. MP3s have been one of the killer apps for the web. Being able to build a little MP3 player that can play MP3s, record them from the radio, AND stream any song you want over a 3G network - that will rock. Again, it's not a fucking cellphone. I want a small cellphone that I can talk into. Maybe a bluetooth headset would be nice. And an ultra-high density fuel cell to power the handset. But other than that, I am pretty satisfied with my cellphone as a thing I use to call people, not a thing I use for video, picture-taking or music-listening.


    I mean, this stuff doesn't take much creativity to come up with. Sending phone-quality pictures to my friends from my cellphone? Eh. Not that impressive. Videophones? They've failed utterly though the technology has been there for years (and the bandwidth is actually there in many households for it to work quite well). No reason to think that video-cellphones will do better. People like cellphones because they can do other shit while they talk on them - I drive and use my cell all the time because I'm a BUSY fucking person (before I get flamed, I always use my handsfree set so I can devote most of my attention to the road).


    So, in short, think of all the cool apps that could be built with 3G wireless bandwidth that ARE NOT cellphones. My car should have a GPS console, with integrated 3G wireless, that lets me search the web, auto-updates the map data (I don't know how the current car-GPS units do this). And audio-on-demand in the car - that would be great. Anyway, there are still things *I* can't do with *my* cell phone - real SMTP email access, real web browsing (not the current shitty excuse for this), download email attachments and view them - I suppose these examples are mostly 2.5G compatible apps, but the ones above seem to require 3G.