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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. "

6 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Well, by Sheetrock · · Score: 4, Funny
    I was trying to figure out what the point of this would be.

    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.




  2. Wow by pHatidic · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. HSDPA by onion2k · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  4. Great! by brunes69 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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!

  5. Re:On a phone? by Ohreally_factor · · Score: 4, Funny

    What's the upload speed? I've been wanting a portable web server on my cell phone so that people could ask me, "Is that a blog in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

    --
    It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
  6. Lack of imagination kills species, story at 11. by MoralHazard · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "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?