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. "

Comments

Re:On a phone?

[rozthepimp]

There is just no use for that much data on a phone. You mean "I personally have no use for this at this time."

Wow

[pHatidic]

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.

Great!

[brunes69]

So, at 3.8 Mbps, I can be paying $7/s for my cell phone, which sets a new world record for price gouging.

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!

Re:Great!

[Red Flayer]

" I don't know how these companies expect a wireless revolution to take place when they are gouging the prices like this."

It's not gouging. Gouging is when you charge overly much (take an unfair advantage) during times of shortage (particularly when the shortage is due to a crisis).

You think it's too expensive -- fine. Don't purchase it, and (hopefully) competition will bring the price down.

But just because something costs more than you feel it's worth doesn't mean that it's gouging.

The reason I think it's important to make this distinction is that price gouging is a serious matter, and 'dilution' of the term by misusing it lessens the effect of using it approriately.

it downloads fast but...

[digitaldc]

...does it make clear phone calls?

Download fast, upload slow

[dada21]

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.

Re:Maybe now....

[tomhudson]

Isn't the whole point of "plugins" that they aren't built in? Ideally, it should come with no plugins, but with a large library of plugins to choose from. Kind of like Firefox.

don't give them any ideas. "Download the latest plug-in - only $3.99 for 3 months"

I want a phone that's a phone - period! I don't want a phone that's also a (crappy) camera and a (crappy) browser and a (crappy) email client and a (crappy) pda and a (crappy) mp3 player and a (crappy) tv and a (crappy) phone.

If I want crap, I'll go read Lord of the Rings.

But try to find a phone nowadays that doesn't have all that junk - you have to pay extra for "no features". Like paying extra for an unlisted phone number.

Re:On a phone?

[GoatMonkey2112]

There are plenty of uses for this. Especially when you consider the large capacity 1" hard drives mentioned earlier. It's probably fast enough to do some streaming video at low resolution and that sort of thing. You could play online games on your phone. You could synchronize your address book. You could use an online mapping system along the lines of google maps maybe integrated with gps based on the location of your phone. etc.

Lack of imagination kills species, story at 11.

[MoralHazard]

"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?

Re:On a phone?

[Heembo]

There is just no use for that much data on a phone.

Right. Just like PC's never need more than 64k of RAM. Dude, you have GOT to be kidding me!