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Samsung Shows Off 3.6Mbps Cellular
dsginter writes "At this week's CES, Samsung Electronics is showing off a 3.6Mbps cellular phone. The device uses High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) to acheive such speeds. "
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Imagine all the first posts I could get with speed that fast and mobile at the same time.
This is not useful untill/unless it is connected to a computer. With a connection to a laptop it would kick arse, but WiMAX or similar is probably more suited to that market. There is just no use for that much data on a phone.
I'm much less worried about the peak bandwidth than the latency, especially on wireless. Plus, beyond a certain point, what good does the excess bandwidth do? I've got much better devices than my phone for viewing/playing/streaming large files anyways.
Fight psychopharmacological mccarthyism. http://www.norml.org/
With such a high bandwidth they'll need a ton of base stations to get decent coverage.
There's only so much spectrum to go around and as the speeds go up the base frequency has to go up (otherwise you get less channels) so all the line-of-sight effects will go up as well. (this will go on until we use lasers for communication like this).
some hot chick...
MP3 Search Engine
But after seeing the download rates of German, UK, and Swedish downloaders in one BitTorrent session, I think it's to buy three of these phones for each side of the ocean and hook the remotes to Bredbandsbolaget.
It'd be easier, faster, and cheaper than trying to find that kind of bandwidth from a local provider, even if you throw in the cost of a house in Sweden.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
The article says the phone has a download speed of 10 MP3s per minute. At least LOC is a relatively fixed amount, this is just ridiculous.
I want one. Include the same screen as my A900 and the screen but add 500Megs of flash, allow bluetooth headset to be used for multimedia playback, have it charge from the USB cable, and you can make it slightly thicker so it has a longer battery life.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
maybe now we'll get a full-featured cell browser. I want lots of plugins built in.
3.6Mbps is actually a little low for the protocol that they're using .. it's supposed to be able to do 8 - 10 Mbps. No mention of why it's not up to scratch in the article though..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSDPA
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Increase the screen size a little, add a neat 1" hard drive, and you get the killer gadget for Christmas 2006 - the mobile TV player. Episodes and movie trailers get pushed to your handset... this is going to be a big technology, and a huge business, especially in countries where the mobile networks aren't regulated into the mud.
Samsung remind me a lot of Sony before they jumped the shark. Excellent reputation, good eye for the next thing.
My blog
...in real life, on a sunny day with a following wind, it should achieve about 2KB a second and cost about 2K$ a second. Where can I get one?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I'm testing some HSDPA cards with Cingular, though the area I'm in the majority of the time does not have HSDPA coverage. I can, however, get an EDGE connection, which is pretty slow feeling. I've been to areas that are covered and the experience seems much snappier (less latency) than the Verizon EV-DO cards that we have as well, though it seems the Verizon cards have better coverage (or maybe I'm just saying that because we can get an EVDO connection in our office where as we can't get an HSDPA or UMTS connection here).
The feel is that there isn't a very big latency, but considering that online gaming is a different animal, it may be much higher.
Seriously, until the carriers have some more reasonable data plans available, all this speed is useless. There is currently no way to get an "unlimited" data plan without a Blackberry with Rogers, and check out this BS added to their "unlimited" blackberry plan:
***Rogers Wireless reserves the right to limit usage and charge $7 per additional MB for excessive usage over 25 MB of data per month.
So, "unlimited" == 25 MB now? WTF?
The only carrier I know of in North America with an true "unlimited" data plan is T-Mobile. I don't know how these companies expect a wireless revolution to take place when they are gouging the prices like this.
I would gladly pay $35 / month for unlimited wirless data + only 100 anytime minutes. Unlimited talk time is useless to me - I want mobile data access dammit!
Does not do any good without a carrier. In the US, they are only just now rolling out UMTS...and thats been around in EU for some time now...don't expect anything like this for a long time kids.
This is pretty neat, but with cell phone companies charging for data by the kilobyte...
Cooool... Yet Another Obscure Abbreviation
Rats! strikeout "Obscure", replace "Useless"
...does it make clear phone calls?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
i have bit torrent and usb cable...no thanks. Oh the joy of being a pirate!
I use Samsung's t809 with T-Mobile's EDGE to get about 150kbps (on the WAP browser as well as via Bluetooth tether to my laptop or PDA). 150kbps is more than enough on the road, and I actually find myself using it at home (even though I have a massive broadband pipe). The latency is very low, web browsing is very snappy, and most of my posts to slashdot come from that combo.
7mbps is useless for a wireless connection, and I think it can be debated to being useless for even a landline connection. It is my opinon that what we need is snappier (lower latency) connections, not huge pipes.
The big concern about 7mbps is battery life, too. My previous PDA phone (HP iPAQ h6315) had WiFi and Bluetooth and the WiFi connection killed the battery life. My current phone with my PDA using just Bluetooth offers me hours and hours of high speed-ish access without the battery hit.
The other killer is upload speed. From what I can tell, FCC safety regulations prevent more than a few upload/transmission channels for cell phone users -- we may not be able to get much past the maximums we have now. I get about a 44kbps upload speed, which is fine for most portable processes. In order to double this speed, we'd need a higher transmit power, which could be dangerous (or maybe it's an unfounded danger, I'm not sure).
Either way, I'd rather see manufacturers spending money on better user interfaces, better power management and reducing the need to lock features out of the phones released. My t809 is an awesome phone, but it still has enough locked and proprietary features as to make it less useful, especially for the power users. I'd happily stay at 100kbps-150kbps and get a few more features on the interface than get 7mbps and lose a few.
I'm GSM, I'm olllddd... ..oh, my hip just cracked.
Why can't we just switch to packet based G3 systems? GSM sucks.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
I use a Verizon EVDO card at work, $80/month unlimited. Much faster than tmobile EDGE. Maintain .7-1mbit in well-covered areas.
I'll be impressed when I can buy a cell phone that actually makes calls without dropping out every 30 seconds.
Browsing on a phone that small, would still be annoying, no matter how fast it is.
[%] Cingular Ringtones
Already ehre.
$20/month with a phone plan, $30/month stand alone. Unlimited.
"Damn...I went over my alloted bandwidth in 3 seconds!"
I am one of those old fashioned people who believes the purpose of a phone is to speak to other people who also have phones. Even if I speak really quickly, 3.6Mbps transfer speeds will not be necessary. Where these speeds I guess come in handy is for those people with terapixel video/camera/pda/file storage devices with phone attachments. Maybe, I shall be convinced these make sense by the end of the decade.
Now I can get pong instantly on my mobile, or my britney spears ringtone! Thanks, but I actually use my phone for... GASP! Calling people...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
HSDPA is part of the W-CDMA standard, which is Qualcomm's next generation high speed cellular tech. The current generation is CDMA data 1xRTT (slow as shit), which is being phased out by the higher speed EVDO (about 400 kbps down, much less upstream), and in some markets by EVDO revision A, which will provide about 400 kbps in both directions.
FYI, CDMA is a peer of GSM. CDMA is used by Sprint, Verizon, Alltel etc, while GSM is used by T-Mobile, Cingular. 1xRTT is CDMA data, while GPRS is GSM data. EVDO et al are high speed CDMA data, while the EDGE stuff is GSM's answer.
That is:
CDMA -> 1xRTT -> EVDO Rev 0 -> EVDO Rev A
GSM -> GPRS -> EDGE
I am more familiar with CDMA, so a GSM expert can fill the holes in my info :)
An important parameter for all the data tech is connection initiation time, which can be substantial. In the case of 1xRTT and EVDO, for example, it can be as much as 3 to 5 seconds, which is a big reason for the perceived slowness. Similar times apply for GPRS and EDGE, I believe. EVDO Rev A, however, has times of less than 1 second, which rocks.
-naeem
[shameless plug]My company, Agilis Systems makes GPS tracking and job management software, AKA Mobile Resource Management.[/shameless plug]"Not useful" is some pretty strong language. You're just not being imaginative.
- Streaming high resolution video and high-quality audio to a cellphone might not seem useful on a tiny little LCD with a crappy speaker, but what about to a phone that has an external "eye-projector" thingamajig and a nice headphone jack? You could watch HDTV on your mobile, reveling in the privacy of the eye screen.
- Streaming similar audio/video FROM the cellphone, LIVE, to remote locations. Can you say "instant news feed"? I knew you could. (And you thought the guy with the pics from the explosive decompression on the airplane was cool?!)
- Replacing expensive, proprietary mobile equipment (visual-overlay eyewear, biometrics) with a reasonably-priced, off-the-shelf cellphone.
And come on, don't you think that one of the primary intended uses IS to connect to a laptop? Sheesh, they let you post any old thing on Slashdot these days, don't they?
TFA gives an example of use most potential customers should be familiar with. I have no clue how long it takes to download the Library of Congress on my current connection.
In any case, all of this reminds me of the problems we (about ten students) had a decade or so back when we got lost on a field trip after our plane ran out of fuel somewhere in the Pacific ocean. We, fortunately, were close to a neighbouring island, and all swam to safety, but we immediately had problems. There was no problem with the notion of being rescued, we found garbage on one side of the island with evidence (old programmes and menus) that a cruise ship landed there once every month to allow passengers to tour. But in the mean time, we had to find food, build shelter, and do something to enable communication throughout the entire island.
The latter probably deserves some explanation. Early on we found that we had problems with people wandering off and being unreachable for extended periods of time. We were worried about the potential for accidents, with people stranded and nobody able to find them. What we all felt was necessary was a crude phone network. Opinion differed as to whether we should use copper, putting fixed line telephones around the island at convenient locations, or whether we should use something like a mobile phone system. In the end, I think most people were agreed the latter was preferable. We used a crude, power level controlled, frequency hopping TDMA over FSK signaling system (largely to save power) with a simple ADPCM codec throttled down to 16kbps (transmitted speech was bearable but hardly "toll quality". We went at that rate to save transistors and also help save power) This took a lot of work, and was quite a learning experience: only one person in the group had ever built a transistor before from raw sand, so you can imagine the problems we had building a full blown mobile phone. Some work though, some of which involved magnifying glasses (well, glasses) and sunlight, meant we were able to build some simple integrated circuits, including one that implemented 16 NAND gates.
In the end, eight of us worked on the mobile phone system, while one went out hunting for food and the other built a number of huts for shelter. The completed system was ready a few days before help finally arrived: it wasn't that impressive, battery life (the batteries weren't rechargable, we used limes with copper and iron cathodes/anodes) was about a day, less if you used the things, and despite seventeen well placed base stations around the island (which was, maybe, five miles wide - it took around three or four hours to walk around the entire thing), there were a number of coverage blackspots.
Anyway, I guess this relates to your point thusly: early on, we had a lot of arguments about what the cellphones should include. Many wanted us to power the things with full blown DSP CPUs rather than build discrete logic finite state machines to control the things. The argument that was with general purpose CPUs, we could also put games, calculators, and calanders on the things. It all came down to timings, with some people feeling we should be as basic as possible, so our phones could be online relatively quickly. In the end the group sided with the latter point of view. Clearly sometimes simpler is better. When you're building a communications system with limited resources, clearly trying to build an all-singing all-dancing cellphone system is stupid. I can't imagine how long it would have taken had we tried to implement, say, a CDMA based system.
As an aside I still have my phone somewhere. I'm very proud of the SIM card, which I built myself out of melted copper and pulp made out of crushed leaves and tree bark juice. The phone number, five-seven-two, is hardwired.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
With so much of this technology being developed and produced in the United states can someone please explain why the US is so far behind in cell phones, Having moved to the US from the UK i was very suprised to find that cell phones over here are at least 2 or 3 years behind Europe.. Why is this? PS. for you elitists on here, if this question has been asked or answered before then flame me, im just too lazy to read through 300+ pages of replies :P
*Gratuitous Sig/Plug* Heres my website - firesuite
Just imagine what you can send in the way of text messages, photographs, audio content, etc.
The big hurdle for the phone companies is going to be working out how best to suck huge amounts of money out of the customer for this high-speed service. I'm sure we're all behind them in this effort...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Who gives a toss about the phone itself, what's (only vaguely) interesting is the actual radio technology capable of this "high" bandwidth.
First, there is no news that needs to be acquired in realtime. If you can't be at your child's birth or wedding, then a simulcast of it would not every satisfy you or your family. The most pressing "news day" in my lifetime was on 9/11/2001 because of the nasty stuff that was going on at the time. Most everyone knew of it within 1/2 an hour despite the complete devastation of the online news sites and telephone networks. I don't think instant news feeds would do anything to propagate the news any faster or better. Sure people may need more portable stock tickers, but that is different. Does realtime deathcounts and bombings help people feel any better than saving it up for incremental updates?
Even though you mentioned the ticker, I can think of news that needs to be acquired realtime. How about stock and options news (not just the prices)? Getting a press release instantly would allow me to follow the market more closely, whether it be to sell off my shares to avoid a drop, or to buy more on good numbers.
Another set of news I can think of could be emergency broadcasts, i.e. tornado warnings, evacuations, or even in the case of the London bombings, which locations to avoid.
Live forever, or die trying.
Now we know why the Telcos are so dead against Muni-WiFi. It cuts them out of the deal. Most Muni-WiFi services aren't as fast as DSL or Cable but its fast enough for snappy web browsing and online games. FPS games do fine on a 512kbps connection speed and MMORPG will do even better. Now we're talking about a phone here, but what if you could connect a USB cable to a high-speed cellphone one day and use it as a WiFi adapter? That would be something that's really useful.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
1. GMail mobile 2. BBC News (mobile edition) 3. eBay mobile All of these sites are perfectly well suited to the small screen (320x240) and to my GPRS T-Mobile connection (fast enough for all of the above three and runs at about $6/mo unlimited). Does slashdot have a mobile site? Navigating the main page is a real pain on my phone...
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Can I get that standard on my laptop or pda for $50 bux instead of my phone? I prefer to have conversations while browsing the net. Not to mention I'll miss an important phone call because my 1.21 Jiggawatt internet connection sucked all the battery out of my phone.
Ever done a `man` on `top` ?