CDMA has been identified as the future technology for 3rd Generation mobile devices.
There will be two flavors - Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) the most important part of the ITU's IMT-2000 family and cdma2000, a not surprisingly similiarly named family of technologies from Qualcomm. There was a hope that once there would be just one 3G standard but alas, vested interests from all sides prevented that.
Before 3G is available you pretty much have 2.5G to keep you going. For the GSM folks (i.e., the whole world except Japan and Korea) that means GPRS and for the Qualcomm CDMA folks (N. America, S. Korea, Japan, Oz and a few other places) it means 1XRTT. 1X is probably going to turn out to have a little faster bit rate than GPRS. (The Qualcomm marketing machine and others push 1X as a 3G technology, sometimes even calling it 3G1X but it only just scrapes in as the IMT2000's definition has 144Kbps as it's lowest 3G rate.)
Billing will be more of an issue IMO. You're probably looking at $25 to $40 US on top of your mobile phone bill for 4MBytes or 10MBytes respectively. So get the company to pay OK?
As with VHS and Betamax, the best technology doesn't always win. AT&T Wireless worked wonders with their IS-136 TDMA technology before switching to GSM/GPRS mainly due to clever marketing and a national reach. I think that GPRS will command most of the world's attention but that 1X will do well for itself.
Totally agree. There are a lot of companies that are going to come out with GPRS PDA's either at the end of this year or early next year that have thumb keyboards. Some are extremely well designed so they can be hidden when not in use. Handspring and Palm are in serious trouble IMO.
"WAP is crap." If there were any decent sites I might be bothered to try it but there aren't.
The PocketPC with a GPRS sleeve or PC Card give me full up wireless access to the real Internet. Replace the iPAQ's OS with Linux if you really want. Personally, I use it all the time but I'm just lucky to actually have early access to the gear.:-)
You're right, but in more detail, it turned out ther guy had just gone to the local electronic store and bought a plasma screen TV for the share holder's meeting!!
WOW, those joints between panels really are invisible!
The guy who invented the working blue laser diode was Shuji Nakamura, now a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He's also just filed suit against the company he worked for back then for 2 billion yen because he claims the patents are his - must have found some kind of loophole in the employment contract I'd guess!
I use CIHost because they're dirt cheap. I didn't like it when they took away lynx ("due to the load it places on the system") but they're just a temporary service for me until I scrape together the real pennies.
Apparently they were blocking IP address spaces on their routers. I couldn't get in from home but work was fine.
I fully expect them to complain when my web site starts really getting hit even though they supposedly offer unlimited bandwidth... yeah right!
My company uses Shiva VPN and there's no Mac client. Shiva before it got bought by Intel had a some dial-in stuff for MacOS but not the VPN client.
Undeterred I tried Virtual PC 3.0. It didn't connect but that could have been the gateway's fault. I've heard it can be done but even if it can I'm fairly sure it'll only tunnel packets from the PC side not the Mac side.
At that I gave up and used a PC for company business.:-(
GPRS is deployed now in a number of cities by VoiceStream and Cingular and AT&T Wireless will deploy it too almost everywhere by the end of this year. However, that doesn't mean you can use it yet because it isn't officially launched. But it's switched on.
Commercial launch should be in time for Christmas. I don't know when AT&T's launch is but if you didn't know already they're deploying GSM/GPRS.
The US will be very well covered by GSM and GPRS going into the future.
GPRS doesn't use a different modulation scheme. Perhaps you're thinking of EDGE. GPRS does however, utilize multi-slot, or the aggrigation of time slots in the transmissions to enable higher data rates. GPRS alos utilizes different coding schemes (different levels of FEC etc) to take advantage of better signal strength. I.e., if you have good signal you don't need as much FEC. Unfortunately, due to constraints in the backhaul, most Operators are only going to use the two lower coding schemes.
If an author releases source code under the GPL, what copyright rights do they retain? I'm especially interested in how an author can control how some software is used, or by whom, which doesn't seem to be covered in the GPL, AFAIK.
And that is the key point: "On close examination, I also discovered that the One-Click patent is far narrower than people assume it is". I read a lot of patents and I write them too. It is the claims of the patent that need to be carefully examined to discover the breadth of the invention. Often novice patent readers give too much creadance to the specification (the bit before the claims) and get all flustered. Invariably the specification contains prior art and a whole stack of description that sets the scene for the invention. Writing a good specification is important to the claims and future continuations/clarifications so bundling the kitchen sink in there is a good technique for the writer.
Further, remember that although the patent can be granted, that doesn't mean that everything is a done deal. Patents can be strong or weak, broad or narrow and you only find that out in litigation (or by asking someone like me to evaluate it for you;-). If you have a good patent attorney they will write the patent assuming it will be challenged in court. That means that a jury might actually end up deciding how good your patent is! A jury - common people. Worry about that!
Finally, software patents are entirely valid in my opinion. Copyright doesn't protect inventions in the same way that a patent can so a patent is required to recoup the R&D investment, especially for the little guy. However, given the fast moving pace of software, actually getting a patent can take so long that the business advantage can be lost. Also, because of this delay in the granting, patents can often come as a surprise to others who thought the invention was commonly available. I would certainly trade fast granting (3 months or so) in exchange for a 2 or 3 year monopoly rather than the current patent lifetime.
Electric motors have amazing torque at low revs so acceleration tests like these are a dream for electric cars. In addition, gears aren't really needed as compared to gas powered engines so you save all the time required to change gear.
The only odd thing about pure electric cars is that when you are stationary there isn't the rumble of an engine. As you're sitting at the stop light and a potential racing mate draws along side you sit there silently - no threatening revs. But when the light goes green - eeeeeeeeeeeeeeekkkkkkk! Eat my dust!
Cliff
If Motorola and Palm were doing just a cellphone/PDA combo they could have done that years ago. No, this is a tri-band GSM/GPRS combo. The GPRS - General Radio Packet Service technology is a genuine digital wide area packet radio system that's being rolled out now throughout the world. The tri-band part would mean that it would operate in N.America, Europe and ROW. In the US, VoiceStream, the pure GSM player, has already trialed GPRS. However, expect the whole of 2001 to get over the chicken-and-egg problem for terminal and network availablity.
So what does GPRS give you? Well, like all good things it gets better with time. Initially you'll see fairly high speed (for wide-area wireless) IP access, comparable to a modem but it'll be "always-on" and charged irrespective of time. I expect we'll see bucket plans of megabits/month, i.e, sort of flat rate but not unlimited. Most of the terminals will support quite high data rates (64kbps), especially for reception (transmission kills your battery!) but it'll be up to the network to have the capacity and capability to support it. In real life it's probably going to be about 50kbps or so peak with maybe 28kbps operational.Again, this is just the starting point and two radio technologies - EDGE (Enhanced Datarates for GSM/Global Evolution) and the infamous 3rd Gen radio system both offer increased data speeds. EDGE is my favorite as it overlays GSM and the data speeds almost come for free. The only problem is that the operators have spent so much on the 3rd Generation licenses that they might skip EDGE in favor of just getting down and dirty with 3G. GPRS should also give you seemless international roaming.
There'll be a number of ways to get access to the GPRS net. First, you could use your GPRS mobile phone and connect it to your laptop or PDA via a cable, IrDA or Bluetooth. The second way is to use a dedicated PC Card in your laptop or a module in your PDA - afterall whose to say you don't want to use AT&T for your phone service and VoiceStream for your wirless IP? The third and final way is what this Motorola/Palm news is about - an embedded device. Incidentally, the VisorPhone is GSM only, i.e., voice and circuit-switched data.
Interestingly enough, in addition to the usual terminal manufacturers (Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson) for GPRS there's going to be a few new faces. Mitsubishi is rumored to have one of the more developed GPRS phones and Xircom has recently entered the fray focusing on GPRS cards and modules.
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There will be two flavors - Wideband CDMA (WCDMA) the most important part of the ITU's IMT-2000 family and cdma2000, a not surprisingly similiarly named family of technologies from Qualcomm. There was a hope that once there would be just one 3G standard but alas, vested interests from all sides prevented that.
Before 3G is available you pretty much have 2.5G to keep you going. For the GSM folks (i.e., the whole world except Japan and Korea) that means GPRS and for the Qualcomm CDMA folks (N. America, S. Korea, Japan, Oz and a few other places) it means 1XRTT. 1X is probably going to turn out to have a little faster bit rate than GPRS. (The Qualcomm marketing machine and others push 1X as a 3G technology, sometimes even calling it 3G1X but it only just scrapes in as the IMT2000's definition has 144Kbps as it's lowest 3G rate.)
Billing will be more of an issue IMO. You're probably looking at $25 to $40 US on top of your mobile phone bill for 4MBytes or 10MBytes respectively. So get the company to pay OK?
As with VHS and Betamax, the best technology doesn't always win. AT&T Wireless worked wonders with their IS-136 TDMA technology before switching to GSM/GPRS mainly due to clever marketing and a national reach. I think that GPRS will command most of the world's attention but that 1X will do well for itself.
Totally agree. There are a lot of companies that are going to come out with GPRS PDA's either at the end of this year or early next year that have thumb keyboards. Some are extremely well designed so they can be hidden when not in use. Handspring and Palm are in serious trouble IMO.
The PocketPC with a GPRS sleeve or PC Card give me full up wireless access to the real Internet. Replace the iPAQ's OS with Linux if you really want. Personally, I use it all the time but I'm just lucky to actually have early access to the gear.
RIM isn't the future, it's a starting point and wireless PDA's will do everything that RIM does, and more.
WOW, those joints between panels really are invisible!
The guy who invented the working blue laser diode was Shuji Nakamura, now a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He's also just filed suit against the company he worked for back then for 2 billion yen because he claims the patents are his - must have found some kind of loophole in the employment contract I'd guess!
The copyright notice is no longer required under US law. See the Library of Congress link: http://www.loc.gov/copyright/circs/circ1.html#noc
I use CIHost because they're dirt cheap. I didn't like it when they took away lynx ("due to the load it places on the system") but they're just a temporary service for me until I scrape together the real pennies. Apparently they were blocking IP address spaces on their routers. I couldn't get in from home but work was fine. I fully expect them to complain when my web site starts really getting hit even though they supposedly offer unlimited bandwidth... yeah right!
My company uses Shiva VPN and there's no Mac client. Shiva before it got bought by Intel had a some dial-in stuff for MacOS but not the VPN client. :-(
Undeterred I tried Virtual PC 3.0. It didn't connect but that could have been the gateway's fault. I've heard it can be done but even if it can I'm fairly sure it'll only tunnel packets from the PC side not the Mac side.
At that I gave up and used a PC for company business.
GPRS is deployed now in a number of cities by VoiceStream and Cingular and AT&T Wireless will deploy it too almost everywhere by the end of this year. However, that doesn't mean you can use it yet because it isn't officially launched. But it's switched on.
Commercial launch should be in time for Christmas. I don't know when AT&T's launch is but if you didn't know already they're deploying GSM/GPRS.
The US will be very well covered by GSM and GPRS going into the future.
GPRS doesn't use a different modulation scheme. Perhaps you're thinking of EDGE. GPRS does however, utilize multi-slot, or the aggrigation of time slots in the transmissions to enable higher data rates. GPRS alos utilizes different coding schemes (different levels of FEC etc) to take advantage of better signal strength. I.e., if you have good signal you don't need as much FEC. Unfortunately, due to constraints in the backhaul, most Operators are only going to use the two lower coding schemes.
If an author releases source code under the GPL, what copyright rights do they retain? I'm especially interested in how an author can control how some software is used, or by whom, which doesn't seem to be covered in the GPL, AFAIK.
Further, remember that although the patent can be granted, that doesn't mean that everything is a done deal. Patents can be strong or weak, broad or narrow and you only find that out in litigation (or by asking someone like me to evaluate it for you ;-). If you have a good patent attorney they will write the patent assuming it will be challenged in court. That means that a jury might actually end up deciding how good your patent is! A jury - common people. Worry about that!
Finally, software patents are entirely valid in my opinion. Copyright doesn't protect inventions in the same way that a patent can so a patent is required to recoup the R&D investment, especially for the little guy. However, given the fast moving pace of software, actually getting a patent can take so long that the business advantage can be lost. Also, because of this delay in the granting, patents can often come as a surprise to others who thought the invention was commonly available. I would certainly trade fast granting (3 months or so) in exchange for a 2 or 3 year monopoly rather than the current patent lifetime.
Cliff.
Electric motors have amazing torque at low revs so acceleration tests like these are a dream for electric cars. In addition, gears aren't really needed as compared to gas powered engines so you save all the time required to change gear. The only odd thing about pure electric cars is that when you are stationary there isn't the rumble of an engine. As you're sitting at the stop light and a potential racing mate draws along side you sit there silently - no threatening revs. But when the light goes green - eeeeeeeeeeeeeeekkkkkkk! Eat my dust! Cliff
Or short those companies as they get sued to death!
If Motorola and Palm were doing just a cellphone/PDA combo they could have done that years ago. No, this is a tri-band GSM/GPRS combo. The GPRS - General Radio Packet Service technology is a genuine digital wide area packet radio system that's being rolled out now throughout the world. The tri-band part would mean that it would operate in N.America, Europe and ROW. In the US, VoiceStream, the pure GSM player, has already trialed GPRS. However, expect the whole of 2001 to get over the chicken-and-egg problem for terminal and network availablity.
So what does GPRS give you? Well, like all good things it gets better with time. Initially you'll see fairly high speed (for wide-area wireless) IP access, comparable to a modem but it'll be "always-on" and charged irrespective of time. I expect we'll see bucket plans of megabits/month, i.e, sort of flat rate but not unlimited. Most of the terminals will support quite high data rates (64kbps), especially for reception (transmission kills your battery!) but it'll be up to the network to have the capacity and capability to support it. In real life it's probably going to be about 50kbps or so peak with maybe 28kbps operational.Again, this is just the starting point and two radio technologies - EDGE (Enhanced Datarates for GSM/Global Evolution) and the infamous 3rd Gen radio system both offer increased data speeds. EDGE is my favorite as it overlays GSM and the data speeds almost come for free. The only problem is that the operators have spent so much on the 3rd Generation licenses that they might skip EDGE in favor of just getting down and dirty with 3G. GPRS should also give you seemless international roaming.
There'll be a number of ways to get access to the GPRS net. First, you could use your GPRS mobile phone and connect it to your laptop or PDA via a cable, IrDA or Bluetooth. The second way is to use a dedicated PC Card in your laptop or a module in your PDA - afterall whose to say you don't want to use AT&T for your phone service and VoiceStream for your wirless IP? The third and final way is what this Motorola/Palm news is about - an embedded device. Incidentally, the VisorPhone is GSM only, i.e., voice and circuit-switched data.
Interestingly enough, in addition to the usual terminal manufacturers (Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson) for GPRS there's going to be a few new faces. Mitsubishi is rumored to have one of the more developed GPRS phones and Xircom has recently entered the fray focusing on GPRS cards and modules.
Links Story: http://www.a llnetdevices.com/wireless/news/2000/09/25/palm_moGPRS Technology: http://www.gprsworld.com/ - Check out the Links page