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Cutting Through the 4G Hype
crimeandpunishment writes "Cell phone companies are about to bombard us with advertising for the next big thing — 4G access. The first 4G phone, Sprint Nextel's EVO, comes out this week. But just how big a deal is 4G? Is it fast enough to warrant the hype, or are consumers better off waiting a while? AP technology writer Peter Svensson looks at the differences between 4G and 3G technologies."
Why not / who do you use now that's better [than Verizon]?
For voice, my phone plan with Virgin Mobile costs me $80 per year. For data, I prefer to use Wi-Fi while in a building and my netbook's hard drive while in a vehicle. In a country with $720 per year mobile broadband, Read It Later on my netbook has already paid for itself.
Until the poor bastard lost his prototype iPhone...
Seriously, people still believe that phone was lost? Seriously?
Here's a tip: when the guy who "found" it tries to sell it for an enormous amount of money _AND_ does his best to hide and/or destroy evidence once he thinks the cops are on to him, that's a pretty strong indication that the item wasn't found - it was stolen. Seriously, we all know the Apple does a lot of tricky marketing with leaking certain pieces of information before a new product release but let's look at all the pieces of this picture - the engineer didn't lose the phone - it was stolen.
As for the rest of your post, someone else already pointed out that Apple has use the #G approach to indicating major generation upgrades to hardware for quite a while now (just look at their towers - 3G, 4G, 5G) so it's not hard to imagine them doing the same for the iPhone. I do, however, agree that calling it the iPhone 4G might create confusion with 4G networks coming out. I don't know if they'll seek out that confusion or elect to call it something more obvious such as the iPhone HD - we'll find out in a week, however.