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No 3G for HP Until 2007
An anonymous reader writes to tell us CNet is reporting that HP will not be bringing 3G support to any of their new 'smart phones' until at least 2007. From the article: "[HP] cites the costs associated with the service, coupled with the fact that 3G's killer app -- TV and video streaming -- isn't yet viable on mobile phones as the primary reasons for its decision. '3G is still only occupying 3% of the world pie,' HP's Vice-President for Consumer Products and Mobile Business Group in the Asia-Pacific region, Chin-Teik SEE, told CNET.com.au at the company's 'magical mobility launch' event in Hong Kong last week."
That's news to me!
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Are going to think like that 3G will never happen :)
-Mark
Is the logical application of 3G bandwidth really streaming video? Maybe if you are the operator charging per packet!
The logical application of higher bandwidth on mobile phones is just an extension of current phone capabilities. Namely, increased mail functionality like graphics and graphical icons, and music downloads. In the business sphere, it makes sense to utilize that bandwidth for file transfers from one mobile phone to another.
But streaming video wasn't ever really high on anyone's list of MUST HAVE functionality. At least not on the user side.
What I really want to know is whether or not 3G will finally bring about a reduction in rates for basic cellular plans. With bandwidth growing and with so many companies competing for customers in the cellular business, there should be a huge drop in rates. We shouldn't have to pay 60 bucks a month for basic cellphone planes, but sadly, I think that will somehow be the case for a very long time to come.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
2007 is only ten months away.
really 867993
Karma schkarma
Will 3G bring us cheaper and faster wireless internet access, or is the bandwidth not high enough?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
I see ads for this everywhere, but I've never seen ANYONE making use of this service. I don't even know when I would if I wanted to. My phone is for talking to people with and maybe SMS. I don't use the internet functionality because the rates are insane.
Telcos don't get it. Provide bandwidth, and let people build services that run on that bandwidth. Being greedy with the apps.. means you get to put a great big 3G waste of money in your pipe (and smoke it).
..don't panic
The US cellphone market ( and most of the Canadian one as well) is now so irrelevant to the world market, that it really does not matter.
CDMA, TDMA, but not GSM for the most part.
Sure, we have a couple of GSM providers, but on an alien frequency (1900).
Add to that the greed of the N. American phone and cellphone providers, and not much in the way of progress is likely to happen here.
So, 3G will slowly push ahead in Asia, where all the tech now is, Europe will follow, and that's all folks.
In the meantime tech like WIMAX will progress, people will soon have portables using that or similar, VoIP on wireless will take off, and pretty soon cell phones as a separate device for talking (only) will become obsolete.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
you won't be watching a full football or cricket match," Chin-Teik told CNET.com.au.
t .asp seems like 3 is already there
Maybe he should take a look at the competition first http://planet3.three.com.au/mobileTV/sport_cricke
Common sense is not so common
There has been ALOT of hype about 3G... We all (well most of us) own a cellphone. There has been numerous polls relating to consumers watching TV/streams on their phones... and most are not interested (its too late at night to dig those polls up). .. Everyone swears WIFI is the shit.. sure if you like being strapped to a starbucks table. Open that bandwidth up to your consumers who live on the road, if i want to watch TV/streams, ill do it through my data cable...
IMHO its a waste of bandwidth. Instead of offering ESPN live feeds (a dull "yay") pass that bandwidth so its actually useable.. I'm forced to use a sierra cord on the road.. (verizon) and the speeds are just... not there.. more like a typical dial up connection (tops out at 128kbs)
Just my 2 cents.. Have a good nite.
-- I Dont Deserve A Sig I Have Bad Karma
Over in Japan, we can get 384kbps data service for about $90/month. Eventually, some US ISP will provide the same service to drive the demand for mobile internet connectivity.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
HP waits while Japanese mobile companies make 3G work. I remember when Japanese companies used to watch HP take risks and innovate, then copy HP. Looks like the US has conceded the tech innovation leadership to the rest of the world for at least the next generation, which will probably last at least 15-20 years.
--
make install -not war
Yeah.. it only took 5 years for SMS to become affordable in North America. :)
..don't panic
HP's stance is not completely on the level. Yes, for the GSM world, including the US, 3G is not really here yet and pricing is also steep for data. But for CDMA, 3G is very much here (Verizon and Sprint) and pricing of 3G (EVDO) for handsets is very reasonable ($15/mo). And there are several decent multimedia and smartphones that support CDMA/EVDO (3G) already, with more on the way. So it is HP that is not keeping up with the market (at least for CDMA in the US).
Do these morons really think I want to pay them to watch 160x120 videos of the black eyed peas on my phone? This is not the killer app you are looking for!
I dont know about Asia, or the rest of Europe, but I know France already has 3G.
The 3G coverage is still pretty small (Paris and most big cities I think) but 3G phones are being marketed there (mostly high end phones).
As for the services, apparently its mostly TV on your mobile and faster internet speeds.
As for the US, The first US cell phone provider (Cingular)is using GSM, on both 800 and 1900. (Europe is using 900 and 1800), so its not that alien at all. They also have started deploying UMTS (aka 3G) in a few select market.
Basically today in the US it seem to turn into a battle between Cingular (GSM - 54M customers) and Verizon (CDMA - 51M customers), after that you get Sprint (CDMA - ~47M) and T-Mobile(GSM - ~20M) and thats about it for nationwide providers.
So far, you probably still have better geographic coverage with CDMA networks, but as far as demographic coverage its going to be pretty much the same.
3% of the world market? Ever heard of critical mass? You need to force a format adoption, you can't just sit and wait for your competitors to make the format a standard greater than 3%, otherwise people will associate them with that manufacturer! Technology will be consumed, even if it is not yet viable. That is why we have Slashdot. Gadget freaks, and forward thinking individuals will buy these products, show them off, and then more will purchase them. Silly man.
Telcos don't get it. Provide bandwidth, and let people build services that run on that bandwidth.
No, actually they do get it. A one way ticket to obsolescence is just being a bandwidth provider. Ask any mid-level dialup ISP from the 90s how they're doing today now that Comcast and SBC have deployed broadband. Where do you think wireless providers will be if someone actually deploys wi-fi throughout a city, or a new technology comes along that provides 5mbit download speeds anywhere?
That's why every wireless provider... scratch that... every media provider of any kind... is trying to bring added value content to the consumer. Ringtones, portable video, SMS: these are all services desperately trying to avoid being just another bandwidth provider. What do you think all of those DSL deals with Yahoo, or Comcast ON-Demand is all about? Bandwidth always gets cheaper until it becomes commoditized. Telcos have to stay ahead of that curve and becomes content providers. So when someone else says they can get a faster line than Comcast to your house, you'll say "Aww, but it doesn't have On-Demand?"
THAT is the point of VCast and every other lame attempt to avoid becoming just pure bandwidth providers.
THAT is the point of VCast and every other lame attempt to avoid becoming just pure bandwidth providers.
Everybody loves selling things with zero marginal cost. I know I do.
Would you buy an operating system for your computer from Ford Motor Company? If you could, would you expect it to be produced efficiently and be a quality product? (perhaps I selected a bad example
Telcos are horrible at providing services and media, and they don't know what content or applications people want. Never mind they already have de-facto or legal monopolies on service already.
Where do you think wireless providers will be if someone actually deploys wi-fi throughout a city, or a new technology comes along that provides 5mbit download speeds anywhere?
There'd be no reason to deploy initially spotty wifi if you had affordable, reliable, available wireless broadband. You don't. So people get mad and roll their own solutions that just might obsolete you. But it's stupid and massively inefficient, because that bandwidth is there now.
..don't panic
Australia's biggest carrier Telstra have written off WiMax and are killing their CDMA network to replace it with a 3G HSDPA service running on the back of its GSM network.
Although the network has a much larger range then WiMax, the bandwidth won't be cheap and it looks like Australia is going to go through the same crap it has gone through Wired Broadband, suffering poor bandwidth at high prices and a very slow adoption rate.
Hopefully startup's like Unwired who are investing in WiMax infrastructure manage to get enough business before thier costs send them broke, its hard competing with monopolies like Telstra, but if Australian communications are to have any decent competitive future it has to be done.
In South Africa 3G networks are becoming more mainstream. The cellular provider here, Vodacom, has set up the pricing structure as follows:
* 3G video calls are charged at the same rate as your current voice rates. That's very forward thinking in my opinion, as it means there is no cost differential between making a voice call or a video call. Video calling is great, don't knock it till you've tried it. I'm hearing impaired and the streaming quality of 3G is so good that I can lipread the person at the other end and have a proper conversation; something I've never been able to do until 3G and 3G cellular phones were introduced (I'm using a Sony Ericsson V600i fyi)
* 3G data usage is charged at the rate of R2/mb, which is around 0.32 USD per megabyte. That's for out-of-bundle rates, so if you signed up for a data bundle, the per megabyte rate would be even lower. Data speeds are unbelievably fast - last week I had to retrieve an email attachment in the client basement parking (prior to a meeting with the client). Attachment was 2Mb in size, it took less than a minute to download it. I have noticed, however, that this depends on how crowded a 3G cell area is - the more 3G users, the slower the speeds.
The next technology on the horizon that will replace 3G is HSPDA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) which in theory should offer around 2Mbit/sec. Until then, 3G is a very good stepping stone that will last for a few years yet, and I would think that manufacturers who don't hop onto the 3G bandwagon reasonably early stand to lose a lot of their potential marketshare.
Cheers
you get your basic service plus about $20 of usage credit (at 3-5 cents per text/email and about 20 cents/min for talk, except for in the middle of the night), half-price for calling someone using the same company, a 2 megapixel camera, the ability to check the train schedules and a dozen other bells and whistles that I don't care about.
Which would you rather have?
People keep claiming that Japanese cells are way ahead of American ones. Hogwash. They have lots of irrelevant features that American ones do not have, but they are far worse for doing what is most important - talking to people! For a number of geographic and cultural reasons (which I do not want to go into), the Japanese have chosen a different solution to the trade-offs that naturally exist in any technology. To think that the technology in Japan is magically better is rather silly, especially because cell phones are not manufactured in Japan!
Would you buy an operating system for your computer from Ford Motor Company? If you could, would you expect it to be produced efficiently and be a quality product? (perhaps I selected a bad example :-) )
Well, you kind of did, because OSes and cars have nothing to do with each other. However if you look at GM's OnStar service, there you have a good example of a service that a car maker has branched into for added revenue (not that it's helped much in their case)
I agree that telcos are horrible at providing services and media. I never claimed any different (except Comcast, but they were already in the content delivery business). I'm just explaining why they keep trying to do it. It's kind of like Sony continually trying to make the world adopt one of their proprietary media formats. They've tried over and over for 30 years, it's never happened, but they're still hoping they can get just once chance at it. Same with any of these telcos and the content they're trying to deliver. They're just hoping for one thing to stick and become a massive influx of new cash.
Verizon Wireless offers unlimited BroadbandAccess for $60/month if you also have a voice plan. Without a voice plan, it's $80/month.
BroadbandAccess is their name for EV-DO, i.e. average speeds of 400-700 kbps, up to 2.4 Mbps. Unfortunately, EV-DO is only available in major cities; everywhere else, you have to fall back to 1xRTT at 60-100 kbps (up to 144 kbps).
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
The hp nc6140 already has a 3G ev-do verizon cell modem in it.9 57-64295-89315-321838-f33-1809460.html
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/321
"not yet viable?" hmm... tell that to my Motorola A835 (Three Network Australia) c.2004, which is dated but still working fine, video and all.
I use a Vodafone branded Option 3G card; it connects at 384kbps in urban areas and costs £20/month for 200MB a month.
That's fast enough for home use IMO; I used to use a Ricochet for home service in San Francisco.
What stands in my way here is the pricing model. It's £1/MB after I reach my 200MB threshold.
I have a normal GPRS mobile, the internet stuff is useful but not a killer.
For me the useful things my current phone (Sony Ericsson K750i) does are the camera (2 megapixel) and the MP3 player (1 gig capacity). Means I carry one thing in my pockeet instead of three.
The real killer app for me is the ability to control my PC with it over bluetooth, handy for presentations and stuff, and for the look on peoples face when the PC suddenly gets a mind of its own.
The most I've ever used the internet access for is to check football (soccer) results on a Saturday afternoon when I wasn't near a TV.
The old HP brought us the HP 65. What was the market for that? 3%? No, it was 0%, since the product had never been made or marketed. It new and exciting.
The new HP is worried about "nascent markets", and is delaying enabling products.
The old HP brought us RPN, and some fine diagnostic kit, that was new and exciting.
The new HP brings us reasonable office printers. I guess it isn't nascent; I like my HP 3015.
They are sure boring now, which is sad because HP is a melange of companies that sure were not boring. HP: first in micro tech, diagnostics, DEC: first in minis, COMPAQ: first in PC cloners.
It looks like first becomes last after two mergers.
Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I won't be looking at a HP Smartphone until 2007 then.
What is this? The middle ages? I don't know about the US but the rest of us here have moved on from GSM/TDMA/CDMAOne. Hell, I've been using UMTS for over 2 years now and I'm wondering when the hell smart phone manufacturers were intending to catch up.
You think the internet rates are insane, but you happily send SMS messages? How much do you pay for one of these 160byte mini-emails anyway?
In the UK, you can get the same for £1 ($2) a day, but only if you're on O2 prepay and phone them up every morning to order the unlimited data package (where they try to sell you a contract "because doing this every day adds up quickly"). "Unlimited" rates for contracts start at £40 ($80) for a 1GB cap.
Hahaha. No, you won't see any cheaper cellphone plans.
Cellcos, particularly in Europe and especially in the UK, Germany and some other countries, have paid huge 3G spectrum license fees that they have to get the consumer to pay. Governments were very pleased to get such a huge windfall - do you, the voting mobile phone user, think it was such a good idea now? Did you ever think anyone but you were going to pay for that license?
There's also the rather huge cost of deploying the necessary infrastructure.
Both of these are fixed costs. Since bandwidth available on 3G services is much higher, this leads to a cost plateau once they've managed to get you to pay out for some of the licence and kit, since the marginal extra cost of another megabyte transferred is very small. It's a high plateau because of the huge cost of the licenses and the equipment.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
The real difficulty here is power consumption. Most 3G radios use 2Wh where as a GMS/GPRS can use less than 1Wh. Combine this with a high power XScale processor and you going to have a short battery life.
Perhaps, next generation of 3G radios will provide longer battery life. After all there is only so much one can do with a 3Wh battery.
"To think that the technology in Japan is magically better is rather silly, especially because cell phones are not manufactured in Japan!"
They're not magically better. They're less stupid, because the software is so much a part of Japanese life that many of the kinks have been worked out. The market for cells is sufficient to justify making better phones. It's just normal market competition.
Your talk of tradeoffs is odd. There's no "amount of nice" that a phone can be, predetermined ahead of time. The niceness of phones is not limited by hardware or price. With the amount of computing power available and a plateau on things like colour screens, a phone can be as nice as anybody bothers to make it.
It's like when the iPod first came out and was competing against Creative's Jukebox. The Jukebox's interface was a pain in the ass, the shape was awkwardly like a CD player for no apparent reason, and using the sync software was like pulling teeth. The iPod was sleek, smooth, and easy to use. It wasn't magic, and nice Japanese cell phones aren't magic.
If the Japanese didn't use a different character set, all the research that goes into making their phones run smoothly would automatically translate into nicer phones for us. Why bother making different versions? But since they do have a different set, localizing the interface isn't simple.
I'm not even sure what you mean about their phones being worse for talking to people. Is the sound quality bad? You don't address that. The fact that Japanese cell plans don't emphasize voice communications doesn't say anything about how good their phones are at making voice calls. It just says the Japanese have a different usage pattern for their features and they pay for them differently.
Finally, this issue of manufacturing is a red herring. Try this:
"To think that computers are magically better in America than Nigeria is rather silly, especially because computers are not manufactured in America!"
It doesn't matter where they're made. What matters is where they're shipped.
Between your confusion about the design of the software, the design of the hardware, the features of the hardware and the calling plan, all of which are essentially independent, I'm hardly likely to take your word on the quality of a foreign market product.
where one of the requirements could be something like
boss: "Meet me at X between 3PM and 5:30pm..."
Me: "I'm sorry, which-- 3pm or 5:30?"
boss: "be there from 3pm til I get there by 5:30 at the latest"
that's why I kept ebooks in my cellphone..... video wouldn't kill me for that either..
(although paying a lot for it would)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
A mate of mine got a 3g phone the other week and we watched some sky tv on it down the pub. Don't think my mate will be watching it much though as he's registered blind!
The two major GSM operators in the US, T-Mobile and Cingular, are at different stages and have different policies. T-Mobile is rolling out EDGE (technically 3G, but relatively slow. It's IDSL to UMTS/EVDO's ADSL), because it's incremental to GSM. It seems to be in most major areas, from my experience. T-Mobile's pricing for EDGE is the same as for GPRS - free for a theoretically port blocked service (SSH, HTTP, and HTTPS work fine), $20 a month for a non-blocked service (behind NAT, or restricted to a certain number of connections, none of which are incoming, your choice, though), plus the price of a regular monthy talk plan.
Cingular is rolling out a variant of UMTS (and has EDGE pretty much everywhere too), albeit on wierd frequencies because the FCC hasn't yet finished the work on freeing the relevent frequencies. This is less of a problem with the CDMA2000 systems, largely because nobody buys an IS95 phone and expects it to work outside of the US anyway (it will in a few areas, but not many.) What Cingular hasn't done yet is start to really market their UMTS based services, whereas Sprint and Verizon both are doing so. Cingular's unlimited service is relatively expensive ($80, IIRC), but it is here, it's rolled out to a significant part of the country, and I suspect they're not marketing it yet because they really don't know what people would want to use it for.
In short, HP's talking out of its arse. 3G, in various forms, is available across most parts of America, with both the world wide open standard UMTS (3GSM), and Qualcomm's proprietary system IS-95 (CDMA2000), well supported. HP might be waiting for everyone in the US to agree on a particular standard, but they're going to lose if they do. 3G will probably never settle down on a particular technology, even Cingular didn't go right for "regular" UMTS, going for HSDPA from the start. Meanwhile WiMax will become increasingly competitive too. If that's HP's reason, they've just announced their long-term withdrawl from relevence.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
People are still talking about 3G?
ian
There's a chance that some idiot reporter did s/UMTS/3G/.
UMTS is still an infant technology with very few successful rollouts outside of the U.S. and no rollouts whatsoever within the U.S. HP would be very smart not to support UMTS, given its abysmal track record.
On the other hand, not supporting CDMA2000 1xEV-DO in the U.S. market would be suicidal with any new smartphone. Note that it seems like this announcement was made by one of their Asian region VPs, so he may indeed have been talking about UMTS. From what I've heard, DoCoMo's UMTS rollout in Japan was a huge flop (handsets with horrible battery life/major overheating problems) while KDDI's EV-DO rollout went very well.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
It seems like HP is exclusively a GSM phone manufacturer, and has no CDMA offerings whatsoever.
Thus, not putting in UMTS would be a wise decision for them. Their units will have no problems competing in the U.S. on GSM-based providers, and they're not even bothering to try competing with EV-DO capable CDMA phones - they won't work on Verizon or Sprint networks at all.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Back to my point. HP rx3715 + bluetooth DUN (yeah, DUN over BT actually works but not out of the box. Still had to google up some stupid "5up3r 53cr3t h4x0r c0d3" in order to enable it. Motorola is VZW's bitch...) and I'm streaming all the video and [mostly] music I want. Skype works damn nice too, but shhhh, don't tell my new VZW overlords. So yeah, it's still the goddamned multi gadget-juggling side-show act which should have been eliminated at least three years and I'm stuck in a contract with the demagogue of greedy, overbearing carriers but this klude will do for now and it's going to take about the length of my contract for Cingular to get UMTS widespread enough and to get a nice handset to market.
I use my phone all the time as a 3g-modem for data. It's awesome. I never even tried videocalls, that doesnt interest me one bit.
Best of all? I've got putty on my phone. You cant beat having access to your servers 24/7. It's nothing you use for casual use, but for emergencies it's unbeatable.
Just keep in mind that the $15 a month is for Verizon charges you is for their VCast service and CANNOT be used to "tether" other devices such as your laptop. If you get caught doing this, Verizon will shut down your account. Only recently has Verizon granted the use of DUN on their phones, in which data plans start at $59.99 - not so cheap. Howard's Forum is a really great site to get acclimated with the various plans and phones.
HP is missing the bandwagon, once again. It took them *YEARS* to develop their T-Mobile PDA phone, and it was already outdated within months of release. 3G *is* more than capable of realtime video streaming. In fact, I use it already. I currently use a UTStarcom xv6700 (AKA HTC Apache) on Verizon with EVDO. With a $59 app from MyTinyTV, I can use my home cable and internet connection to steam any channel I want using my TV tuner on my home PC to my PDA. 3G might not be available in more than 3% of the world markets, but consider that at least in the US, most of the population lives in the 54 metropolitan areas that EV-DO is currently offered. The idea is to stay *ahead* of the curve, not behind it. Making crap decisions like these will ensure HP will always be second rate.
I've had a 48G since 1993.
My other first post is car post.
Do the math...$20 of credit at 20 cents/min? That's 100 minutes a month, assuming I send no text messages. In reality, I use up about half of my credit with texts, so I really have 50 minutes/month at best before I have to start paying additional fees. Compare that to 400 minutes of anytime and unlimited nights/weekends for about the same price in the states. Reception and quality is similar to that of equivalent geographic areas in the US.
In return for that, I get all sorts of cutesy icons and features that I have no interest in using. Japanese phones can do more things than ours, but do not do the important ones as well. The tradeoffs exist more in price than technology. To support all the extra features while maintaining reasonable prices, the Japanese companies have to limit talk time.