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Cutting Through the 4G Hype

Posted by kdawson on from the sitting-out-a-generation dept.

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."

6 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Golden Girls! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Thank you for being a friend
    Traveled down the road and back again
    Your heart is true you're a pal and a cosmonaut.

    And if you through a party
    Invited everyone you ever knew
    You would see the biggest gift would be from me
    And the card attached would say thank you for being a friend.

    1. Re:Golden Girls! by germansausage · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Well he ran down the hall and he cried Oh how could his garments have lied When they said he was an only son He thought he was the only one Oh what a lonely boy Oh what a lonely boy Oh what a lonely boy

    2. Re:Golden Girls! by pspahn · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      i loled at cosmonaut

      --
      Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
  2. Re:On paper it looks like a good phone. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    > I couldn't care less about the 4G side.

    There, fixed that for you.

    I could care less that you fixed that for him.

  3. Wi-Fi by tepples · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    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.

  4. Re:a brief experience with 4G, since november by whisper_jeff · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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.