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Samsung Shows Off 3.6Mbps Cellular

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the well-isn't-that-fancy dept.

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. "

3 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Latency? by GWSuperfan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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/
    1. Re:Latency? by Kijori · · Score: 3, Interesting
      With the tiny HDs on Slashdot earlier, I can imagine this being useful. Perhaps not for downloading large files, but if a 500Kb+ service were provided with flat-rate residential broadband, I would definitely find uses for it:
      -Grabbing that file you've left on the home PC so you look organized
      -Checking the news
      -Streaming music from a home PC rather than storing it separately.

      I don't know about you, but I would love a service that opend up my phone as a thin-client for my home PC. If the service gets fast enough you could even stream video camera footage back to your home PC at 10Mb/s, where it gets stored and converted to Divx or similiar and made available for you. With the right set of batch scripts, your PC could react automatically to what you send it and perform the most likely action that you want it to do. When you get back you've got your days work archived in raw format as well as converted to your preferred compression format, categorised and available to you over that same internet connection. Perhaps sending it images generates thumbnails and files the originals, sending an archive extracts it to ~, sending it a program installs it...

      Obviously there are security problems to consider - you don't want just anyone to be able to use their phone to control your PC - but if it only responded to your phone, which authenticates you biometrically as well as having a password to operate the PC, the system could be more secure than the standard PC at the moment (although that's not really saying much with the current WMF problems. Not looking forward to cleaning that one up...).

      PS: Is it just me or is everything getting modded funny in this article? Or have I just missed a lot of jokes...

  2. HSDPA is pretty nice by Stonent1 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.