"The phone carriers have all their phones marked up greatly so they can give you a giant fake discount when you sign your two year deal. That all needs to go away."
Then why is it that phones that do not originate from the carriers are so much more expensive? The carriers are not marking up prices on the hardware at all to provide a "perceived" discount. They are providing significant discounts for subsidized phones, and are basically selling carrier-locked but non-subsidized phones at cost.
The non-contract non-subsidized price (but SIMlocked) of a typical phone directly from a GSM carrier is significantly less than the same phone sold unlocked from a non-carrier entity. See, for example, non-contract but SIMlocked HTC Kaiser (AT&T Tilt) for $549, while the unlocked Kaiser variant (HTC TyTn II) is typically $779-799.
I don't know about initial service, but I know plenty of people have purchased non-contract-subsidized Tilts and not had their contracts extended because of it.
I have a feeling that it is possible to obtain initial service without a contract, it is just that AT&T will make it as hard as possible to do so and/or their customer service reps aren't competent enough to do it. It's a problem with basically all wireless carriers (and pretty much all companies in general) - the majority of their customer service reps aren't competent enough to handle the "tough/unusual" stuff, just the "standard bread and butter" stuff.
They tend to be hard to find in B&M stores in the U.S. because there is little to no market for such phones. Average Joe Wireless User wants his $800 phone for $300 and doesn't care that it locks him into a 2-year-contract. Heck, even non-average-joes like myself don't care much about getting locked into a 2-year contract, and are definately fine with it when it saves $500.
You can buy them from reputable online specialists such as Mobileplanet, and in some cases, directly from the manufacturer.
Yeah, unfortunately this may still be the case in some areas, although as a former Verizon customer that has switched to AT&T within the past two months, at this point I'm fairly confident in saying that Verizon has lost most of the (previously massive) coverage lead they had five years ago.
When I was in college, Verizon was the only choice if you wanted coverage in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, and upstate NY in general.
Now that I have AT&T, I have not encountered a single situation where my VZW Treo 650 worked and my new AT&T Tilt doesn't, and in fact have encountered many situations where my Tilt gets better coverage than my T650, such as at my aunt's farm in the middle of nowhere.
I don't see why I would ever want to do such a thing, the only thing the TT2 has over the Tilt is the (rather gimmicky) front camera.
Unlocked? - Not much point if you're in a 2-year contract with AT&T (Required to get the $299 Tilt). Anyway, they'll give you an unlock code with not much hassle if you're a customer in good standing (i.e. all bills paid) for 90 days. HTC ROM instead of AT&T ROM? - HardSPL was released over two weeks ago. My Tilt is running the HTC ROM.:)
Because the market for such phones is not sufficiently large for their to be a significant B&M presence.
That's why you only see unlocked phones from specialty online retailers such as Mobileplanet and some manufacturers, such as Motorola.
Note: This only applies (essentially) to AT&T and T-Mobile, the two major GSM carriers in the U.S. Unfortunately, while the modulation scheme and protocol suite of cdmaOne/CDMA2000 are superior to GSM, GSM has one major advantage - The use of a standardized SIM (Subscriber Identification Module) is mandatory for GSM handsets, meaning all you need is a SIM from the carrier and a phone either from the carrier or a vendor of non-carrier-locked handsets (such as Mobileplanet).
AT&T and T-Mobile allow bring-your-own-handset but don't advertise it because, in reality, there is unfortunately no market for it, and they would prefer for users to use the carrier's handsets, for two reasons:
Sometimes features of carrier-branded handsets are crippled to make the user have to pay for extra features (See Verizon and Bluetooth DUN on the Treo 650).
Sometimes carrier-branded handsets have extra marketing/"features" designed to get you to pay for services from the carrier. (Such as the built-in "XM Radio" app on AT&T versions of HTC devices.)
Those two reasons are why you never see "BYOD" discounts, similarly you don't see service discounts for non-contract-subsidized phones from the carriers. Your "discount" is the fact that you are not locked into a contract.
FIoS - Available in maybe 1% of the United States. See my comment about option 3) not being an option in probably 50%+ of the country. If you can't even get Verizon DSL, there's no way in hell you're getting FIoS.
Low-latency satellite - Um, please tell me when faster-than-light communications was invented? Service from a geosynchronous satellite can fundamentally not be low-latency (which is what all of the affordable satellite network services are.) That 45,000 mile round trip (22.5k each way) round trip is a bitch even at the speed of light. So far, no one has been able to provide even an affordable voice LEO satellite system (see the miserable failure of Iridium), let alone high speed data.
One additional thing - "Entrepreneurs could sell handsets with capabilities that are unavailable -- or unavailable at affordable prices -- from current carriers."
Not going to happen. Well, they could pull off "capabilities that are unavailable", but they won't be able to pull off "unavailable at affordable prices from current carriers". It's a known fact that non-subsidized unlocked phones are going to be expensive. The manufacturer and all the vendors in between want to make some profit on the device, while for a locked phone, the carrier will sell it at cost knowing it will make them money 95% of the time, and for a contract subsidized phone, the carrier will take a loss knowing that they are guaranteed income via the contract.
For example: AT&T Tilt - As low as $299 with contract and a "qualifying data plan" of $40/month beyond whatever voice plan you have AT&T Tilt - $549 or so without contract and without any rebates, but still SIMlocked to AT&T HTC TyTn II (The Tilt is just a carrier-branded TT2) - $799 typically for an unlocked unit. Yes it also happens to have one additional feature (low-res front camera), but that feature isn't what is jacking up the price by $250 over the locked no-contract variant, it's the fact that it is unlocked.
One: The network owner can bastardize the definition of "tested, safe, and compatible" in any way they please. For example, "tested, safe, and compatible" is the excuse Verizon has for delaying the release of phones for 6-9 months past the same unit's release on other networks. (In reality, it's because they're crippling various features of the phone to make more money - see the manner in which they delayed the Treo 650 for at least six months and disabled Bluetooth DUN capability in the process.) This happens to be one of a number of reasons why I am no longer a Verizon customer.
Two: You can already use any FCC-certified GSM device on any of the GSM networks in the U.S. Just pop in your SIM and go. (Assuming that your handset itself is not locked to a different carrier.) For example, you can buy an unlocked HTC TyTn II directly from the manufacturer, pop in a T-Mobile or AT&T SIM, and be up and running immediately. Want a droolworthy device like the HTC Advantage series? Just pop in your SIM and go.
In the end, unless there's something "unusual" in the details, this doesn't appear to be much different (if at all) from the status quo.
Unfortunately, those workarounds won't work. First, there's a bit of overhead for initiating a TCP connection. Second, TCP needs some time for the congestion control algorithm to ramp up the rates.
Some OSes do have the ability to "short circuit" this in some situations, for example I believe the Linux TCP stack remembers the most recent TCP congestion control parameters for a given endpoint and uses them for new connections made to that same destination IP, but this is something entirely controlled by the OS, not the application.
It does affect people using encryption, since the detection is apparently made by traffic analysis and not content analysis, and the closing is done at the transport protocol level.
The only encryption that would work would be a transport protocol other than TCP which prevents "man in the middle" impersonation of protocol control flags. (Such as TCP tunneled over an IPSec or PPTP VPN).
Application-layer encryption won't help when they are interfering with the underlying transport protocol, and classifying BT based on traffic patterns and not content.
Their system is aggressive enough that it is treating other protocols (including Lotus Notes) as BT and interfering with them in an identical manner, even ones that use application-layer encryption.
As another person said, the only way around what they are doing is to use an encrypted transport protocol instead of TCP, which usually requires OS kernel cooperation (although you could probably layer a roll-your-own encrypted transport over UDP...)
I think Comcast is going to shoot themselves in the foot. By abusing low-level aspects of TCP and effectively blocking the connections instead of simply throttling them (somewhat evil) or dropping that traffic's priority (I would be fine with this, hell I do it for all BT traffic leaving my home network anyway), Comcast is going to force the development of P2P protocols that use an arbitrary transport layer layered over UDP, possibly with encryption.
The end results: 1) There's a good chance the congestion control of this new scheme won't be as well designed as TCP's, resulting in the protocol being even more intrusive/degrading to the network than existing P2P protocols. 2) There will probably be some additional overhead and headers added to support encryption, resulting in more data being sent over the wire for the exact same amount of information being transferred.
Of course, there is the possibility that someone might develop a "VPN overlay" network for this traffic that is multicast aware, which in the end will actually save bandwidth.
In the end, the best would be if Comcast and other ISPs would get their act together and start rolling out IP multicast support. While no P2P protocol makes use of it now (why bother when no networks support it?), if it were widely available, P2P protocols would adopt multicast very quickly, resulting in a MASSIVE reduction in the amount of traffic used by P2P. Instead of 50,000 copies of the same file sent via BitTorrent, 500 copies might get sent to 100 recipients on average.
Unfortunately, due to the way "last mile" service infrastructure works, the consumer has four choices:
1) No ISP at all 2) Dialup (with plenty of choices) 3) DSL from the local monopoly (although there are reseller agreements in place here allowing for a little bit of choice but not much) 4) Cable from the local monopoly
In many places, due to distance from the nearest telco CO, 3) isn't an option, so it's either nothing, dialup, or cable. For example, my apartment complex is in such a situation and it isn't even that far from the center of town.
I've had 30-minute delays occur for incoming flights at Newark less than 45 minutes (my typical drive time to the airport) from landing. This isn't a rare occurrence - Some degree of delay added in the last 45 minutes of the flight happened on probably 3/4 of my pickups.
I don't know how many times I left the house to catch an "on time" flight landing 30 minutes from then (+15 for baggage pickup), only to stop at my usual spot, check flight status from my phone, and find out that a flight that should have landed was now 30 minutes from landing.
I don't know about 2G GSM, but 2G CDMA (aka Qualcomm cdmaOne) is dependent on continuous transmit power output control for handsets to solve the near/far problem.
Very often, the person picking you up will be waiting just off-airport at a safe/sane parking spot, rather than looping around the airport or paying $50 just to park for 15 minutes.
Back when I was in graduate school I would frequently pick my father up from the airport. Rather than loop around the airport, contributing to traffic 10-20 times, I would park in a small parking lot near the airport and wait for a call. (Similarly, about half the limo drivers picking people up at Newark Airport do the same, in fact I picked up the trick from observing them.)
While the person picking you up can see when the plane lands (esp. with a cell phone that has a data plan), the person picking you up doesn't have any status info on whether the luggage pickup system got delayed.
If all this doom and gloom you claim for AT&T's network were actually possible, it would already have happened with other devices such as the HTC TyTn/TyTn II (both of which AT&T has resold under different names, the 8525 and Tilt respectively.)
Windows Mobile 5 and 6 are far more open than even this proposed SDK (WM5/6 only warn you when running an unsigned app as opposed to blocking it), and I have yet to see any reports of the myriad of WM5/6 devices usable on AT&T's network causing any problems, even unlocked/unbranded phones not sold by AT&T in the first place.
One thing I wonder - Will the iPhone SDK let a user that chooses to "live on the edge" install unsigned apps?
That's one of the things I like about my AT&T Tilt (aka HTC TyTn II) - It pops up a warning the first time you try to run/install an unsigned app, and then remembers your response, never bothering you again if you clicked "yes".
The only thing a signed app gets you is "no warning".
Of course, very few apps are actually signed so people get rather accustomed to clicking "yes" in a manner similar to Vista.
The OP is probably from Europe, where unlimited data plans did not exist until the iPhone was rolled out in the UK. (On the other hand, their pay-as-you-go data was MUCH cheaper than what U.S. carriers charge for pay-as-you-go data.)
In general, it appears to me that Europe has more of a pay-as-you-go approach than the U.S. "flat rate monthly contract" approach, but European pay-as-you-go prices are MUCH more reasonable than U.S. pay-as-you-go prices for both voice and data.
In addition, the limiting factor in terms of operational (i.e. transferring data) battery life of a phone is almost always not the CPU, but the radio. Regardless of whether the signal processing scheme uses any more power, CDMA-based modulation schemes (such as UMTS - yes, 3G/3.5G GSM uses a CDMA modulation scheme, even though it is not part of Qualcomm's CDMA2000/cdmaOne protocol suite.) require a linear (inefficient) transmit power amplifier, while the GMSK-based modulation scheme used for GSM/EDGE could use a nonlinear (efficient) power amplifier. Early UMTS handsets had AWFUL battery life due to this and handset manufacturer's complete lack of experience with CDMA modulation schemes. Since then, Qualcomm has gotten involved with UMTS and is now one of the most common suppliers of UMTS mobile chipsets (in addition to chipsets for their own protocol suite) which perform much better than earlier UMTS chipsets due to Qualcomm's years of experience with CDMA. That said, there seem to be some underlying flaws in UMTS (likely a higher peak-to-average ratio of the signal) that make it use more battery life than Qualcomm's own CDMA-based suites.
That said, there's now a lot of confusion between CDMA the modulation scheme and cdmaOne/CDMA2000 (Qualcomm's protocol suites based on CDMA modulation). If you are using a 3G network, you are using CDMA modulation, regardless of whether you are using UMTS (the protocol suite for 3G GSM, which moved from the GMSK modulation used for 2G/2.5G GSM networks to a CDMA based modulation scheme), or CDMA2000 1xEV-DO (Qualcomm's 3G protocol suite.)
Yeah, and lack of time sync sounds more like a phone issue than a network issue.
If we really wanted an apples-to-apples comparison of EDGE vs. 3G performance, we'd need a comparison done on the same phone with the same browser, for example maybe an HTC TyTn II with one of the "bandswitch" apps that allows UMTS to be forced on and off.
Whether it is built into the motherboard or is built into the chipset itself, it almost always still has an "internal only" PCI, AGP, or PCI-E interface, and is thus affected by the performance limitations of that interface.
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"The phone carriers have all their phones marked up greatly so they can give you a giant fake discount when you sign your two year deal. That all needs to go away."
Then why is it that phones that do not originate from the carriers are so much more expensive? The carriers are not marking up prices on the hardware at all to provide a "perceived" discount. They are providing significant discounts for subsidized phones, and are basically selling carrier-locked but non-subsidized phones at cost.
The non-contract non-subsidized price (but SIMlocked) of a typical phone directly from a GSM carrier is significantly less than the same phone sold unlocked from a non-carrier entity. See, for example, non-contract but SIMlocked HTC Kaiser (AT&T Tilt) for $549, while the unlocked Kaiser variant (HTC TyTn II) is typically $779-799.
I don't know about initial service, but I know plenty of people have purchased non-contract-subsidized Tilts and not had their contracts extended because of it.
I have a feeling that it is possible to obtain initial service without a contract, it is just that AT&T will make it as hard as possible to do so and/or their customer service reps aren't competent enough to do it. It's a problem with basically all wireless carriers (and pretty much all companies in general) - the majority of their customer service reps aren't competent enough to handle the "tough/unusual" stuff, just the "standard bread and butter" stuff.
They tend to be hard to find in B&M stores in the U.S. because there is little to no market for such phones. Average Joe Wireless User wants his $800 phone for $300 and doesn't care that it locks him into a 2-year-contract. Heck, even non-average-joes like myself don't care much about getting locked into a 2-year contract, and are definately fine with it when it saves $500.
You can buy them from reputable online specialists such as Mobileplanet, and in some cases, directly from the manufacturer.
For example, to buy unlocked GSM phones from Motorola - http://www.store.motorola.com/mot/en/US/adirect/motorola - Click on "Unlocked GSM"
Yeah, unfortunately this may still be the case in some areas, although as a former Verizon customer that has switched to AT&T within the past two months, at this point I'm fairly confident in saying that Verizon has lost most of the (previously massive) coverage lead they had five years ago.
When I was in college, Verizon was the only choice if you wanted coverage in the Finger Lakes region of New York State, and upstate NY in general.
Now that I have AT&T, I have not encountered a single situation where my VZW Treo 650 worked and my new AT&T Tilt doesn't, and in fact have encountered many situations where my Tilt gets better coverage than my T650, such as at my aunt's farm in the middle of nowhere.
I don't see why I would ever want to do such a thing, the only thing the TT2 has over the Tilt is the (rather gimmicky) front camera.
:)
Unlocked? - Not much point if you're in a 2-year contract with AT&T (Required to get the $299 Tilt). Anyway, they'll give you an unlock code with not much hassle if you're a customer in good standing (i.e. all bills paid) for 90 days.
HTC ROM instead of AT&T ROM? - HardSPL was released over two weeks ago. My Tilt is running the HTC ROM.
Because the market for such phones is not sufficiently large for their to be a significant B&M presence.
That's why you only see unlocked phones from specialty online retailers such as Mobileplanet and some manufacturers, such as Motorola.
Note: This only applies (essentially) to AT&T and T-Mobile, the two major GSM carriers in the U.S. Unfortunately, while the modulation scheme and protocol suite of cdmaOne/CDMA2000 are superior to GSM, GSM has one major advantage - The use of a standardized SIM (Subscriber Identification Module) is mandatory for GSM handsets, meaning all you need is a SIM from the carrier and a phone either from the carrier or a vendor of non-carrier-locked handsets (such as Mobileplanet).
AT&T and T-Mobile allow bring-your-own-handset but don't advertise it because, in reality, there is unfortunately no market for it, and they would prefer for users to use the carrier's handsets, for two reasons:
Sometimes features of carrier-branded handsets are crippled to make the user have to pay for extra features (See Verizon and Bluetooth DUN on the Treo 650).
Sometimes carrier-branded handsets have extra marketing/"features" designed to get you to pay for services from the carrier. (Such as the built-in "XM Radio" app on AT&T versions of HTC devices.)
Those two reasons are why you never see "BYOD" discounts, similarly you don't see service discounts for non-contract-subsidized phones from the carriers. Your "discount" is the fact that you are not locked into a contract.
FIoS - Available in maybe 1% of the United States. See my comment about option 3) not being an option in probably 50%+ of the country. If you can't even get Verizon DSL, there's no way in hell you're getting FIoS.
Low-latency satellite - Um, please tell me when faster-than-light communications was invented? Service from a geosynchronous satellite can fundamentally not be low-latency (which is what all of the affordable satellite network services are.) That 45,000 mile round trip (22.5k each way) round trip is a bitch even at the speed of light. So far, no one has been able to provide even an affordable voice LEO satellite system (see the miserable failure of Iridium), let alone high speed data.
One additional thing - "Entrepreneurs could sell handsets with capabilities that are unavailable -- or unavailable at affordable prices -- from current carriers."
Not going to happen. Well, they could pull off "capabilities that are unavailable", but they won't be able to pull off "unavailable at affordable prices from current carriers". It's a known fact that non-subsidized unlocked phones are going to be expensive. The manufacturer and all the vendors in between want to make some profit on the device, while for a locked phone, the carrier will sell it at cost knowing it will make them money 95% of the time, and for a contract subsidized phone, the carrier will take a loss knowing that they are guaranteed income via the contract.
For example:
AT&T Tilt - As low as $299 with contract and a "qualifying data plan" of $40/month beyond whatever voice plan you have
AT&T Tilt - $549 or so without contract and without any rebates, but still SIMlocked to AT&T
HTC TyTn II (The Tilt is just a carrier-branded TT2) - $799 typically for an unlocked unit. Yes it also happens to have one additional feature (low-res front camera), but that feature isn't what is jacking up the price by $250 over the locked no-contract variant, it's the fact that it is unlocked.
One: The network owner can bastardize the definition of "tested, safe, and compatible" in any way they please. For example, "tested, safe, and compatible" is the excuse Verizon has for delaying the release of phones for 6-9 months past the same unit's release on other networks. (In reality, it's because they're crippling various features of the phone to make more money - see the manner in which they delayed the Treo 650 for at least six months and disabled Bluetooth DUN capability in the process.) This happens to be one of a number of reasons why I am no longer a Verizon customer.
Two: You can already use any FCC-certified GSM device on any of the GSM networks in the U.S. Just pop in your SIM and go. (Assuming that your handset itself is not locked to a different carrier.) For example, you can buy an unlocked HTC TyTn II directly from the manufacturer, pop in a T-Mobile or AT&T SIM, and be up and running immediately. Want a droolworthy device like the HTC Advantage series? Just pop in your SIM and go.
In the end, unless there's something "unusual" in the details, this doesn't appear to be much different (if at all) from the status quo.
Unfortunately, those workarounds won't work. First, there's a bit of overhead for initiating a TCP connection. Second, TCP needs some time for the congestion control algorithm to ramp up the rates.
Some OSes do have the ability to "short circuit" this in some situations, for example I believe the Linux TCP stack remembers the most recent TCP congestion control parameters for a given endpoint and uses them for new connections made to that same destination IP, but this is something entirely controlled by the OS, not the application.
It does affect people using encryption, since the detection is apparently made by traffic analysis and not content analysis, and the closing is done at the transport protocol level.
The only encryption that would work would be a transport protocol other than TCP which prevents "man in the middle" impersonation of protocol control flags. (Such as TCP tunneled over an IPSec or PPTP VPN).
Application-layer encryption won't help when they are interfering with the underlying transport protocol, and classifying BT based on traffic patterns and not content.
Their system is aggressive enough that it is treating other protocols (including Lotus Notes) as BT and interfering with them in an identical manner, even ones that use application-layer encryption.
As another person said, the only way around what they are doing is to use an encrypted transport protocol instead of TCP, which usually requires OS kernel cooperation (although you could probably layer a roll-your-own encrypted transport over UDP...)
I think Comcast is going to shoot themselves in the foot. By abusing low-level aspects of TCP and effectively blocking the connections instead of simply throttling them (somewhat evil) or dropping that traffic's priority (I would be fine with this, hell I do it for all BT traffic leaving my home network anyway), Comcast is going to force the development of P2P protocols that use an arbitrary transport layer layered over UDP, possibly with encryption.
The end results:
1) There's a good chance the congestion control of this new scheme won't be as well designed as TCP's, resulting in the protocol being even more intrusive/degrading to the network than existing P2P protocols.
2) There will probably be some additional overhead and headers added to support encryption, resulting in more data being sent over the wire for the exact same amount of information being transferred.
Of course, there is the possibility that someone might develop a "VPN overlay" network for this traffic that is multicast aware, which in the end will actually save bandwidth.
In the end, the best would be if Comcast and other ISPs would get their act together and start rolling out IP multicast support. While no P2P protocol makes use of it now (why bother when no networks support it?), if it were widely available, P2P protocols would adopt multicast very quickly, resulting in a MASSIVE reduction in the amount of traffic used by P2P. Instead of 50,000 copies of the same file sent via BitTorrent, 500 copies might get sent to 100 recipients on average.
Unfortunately, due to the way "last mile" service infrastructure works, the consumer has four choices:
1) No ISP at all
2) Dialup (with plenty of choices)
3) DSL from the local monopoly (although there are reseller agreements in place here allowing for a little bit of choice but not much)
4) Cable from the local monopoly
In many places, due to distance from the nearest telco CO, 3) isn't an option, so it's either nothing, dialup, or cable. For example, my apartment complex is in such a situation and it isn't even that far from the center of town.
I've had 30-minute delays occur for incoming flights at Newark less than 45 minutes (my typical drive time to the airport) from landing. This isn't a rare occurrence - Some degree of delay added in the last 45 minutes of the flight happened on probably 3/4 of my pickups.
I don't know how many times I left the house to catch an "on time" flight landing 30 minutes from then (+15 for baggage pickup), only to stop at my usual spot, check flight status from my phone, and find out that a flight that should have landed was now 30 minutes from landing.
Not new.
Google for psdoom...
I don't know about 2G GSM, but 2G CDMA (aka Qualcomm cdmaOne) is dependent on continuous transmit power output control for handsets to solve the near/far problem.
Parking.
Very often, the person picking you up will be waiting just off-airport at a safe/sane parking spot, rather than looping around the airport or paying $50 just to park for 15 minutes.
Back when I was in graduate school I would frequently pick my father up from the airport. Rather than loop around the airport, contributing to traffic 10-20 times, I would park in a small parking lot near the airport and wait for a call. (Similarly, about half the limo drivers picking people up at Newark Airport do the same, in fact I picked up the trick from observing them.)
While the person picking you up can see when the plane lands (esp. with a cell phone that has a data plan), the person picking you up doesn't have any status info on whether the luggage pickup system got delayed.
Bullshit.
If all this doom and gloom you claim for AT&T's network were actually possible, it would already have happened with other devices such as the HTC TyTn/TyTn II (both of which AT&T has resold under different names, the 8525 and Tilt respectively.)
Windows Mobile 5 and 6 are far more open than even this proposed SDK (WM5/6 only warn you when running an unsigned app as opposed to blocking it), and I have yet to see any reports of the myriad of WM5/6 devices usable on AT&T's network causing any problems, even unlocked/unbranded phones not sold by AT&T in the first place.
Sounds like you just described my AT&T Tilt (aka HTC TyTn II), or even its predecessor the AT&T 8525 (aka HTC TyTn)
The TyTn/8525 has been out for over a year, the Tilt for 2 weeks and the unlocke/unbranded TT2 variant for six.
One thing I wonder - Will the iPhone SDK let a user that chooses to "live on the edge" install unsigned apps?
That's one of the things I like about my AT&T Tilt (aka HTC TyTn II) - It pops up a warning the first time you try to run/install an unsigned app, and then remembers your response, never bothering you again if you clicked "yes".
The only thing a signed app gets you is "no warning".
Of course, very few apps are actually signed so people get rather accustomed to clicking "yes" in a manner similar to Vista.
Oops, I guess I was wrong. I recall that the addition of unlimited data plans for the iPhone in the UK seemed like really big news.
The OP is probably from Europe, where unlimited data plans did not exist until the iPhone was rolled out in the UK. (On the other hand, their pay-as-you-go data was MUCH cheaper than what U.S. carriers charge for pay-as-you-go data.)
In general, it appears to me that Europe has more of a pay-as-you-go approach than the U.S. "flat rate monthly contract" approach, but European pay-as-you-go prices are MUCH more reasonable than U.S. pay-as-you-go prices for both voice and data.
In addition, the limiting factor in terms of operational (i.e. transferring data) battery life of a phone is almost always not the CPU, but the radio. Regardless of whether the signal processing scheme uses any more power, CDMA-based modulation schemes (such as UMTS - yes, 3G/3.5G GSM uses a CDMA modulation scheme, even though it is not part of Qualcomm's CDMA2000/cdmaOne protocol suite.) require a linear (inefficient) transmit power amplifier, while the GMSK-based modulation scheme used for GSM/EDGE could use a nonlinear (efficient) power amplifier. Early UMTS handsets had AWFUL battery life due to this and handset manufacturer's complete lack of experience with CDMA modulation schemes. Since then, Qualcomm has gotten involved with UMTS and is now one of the most common suppliers of UMTS mobile chipsets (in addition to chipsets for their own protocol suite) which perform much better than earlier UMTS chipsets due to Qualcomm's years of experience with CDMA. That said, there seem to be some underlying flaws in UMTS (likely a higher peak-to-average ratio of the signal) that make it use more battery life than Qualcomm's own CDMA-based suites.
Sure it is. CDMA2000 1xEV-DO is 3G.
That said, there's now a lot of confusion between CDMA the modulation scheme and cdmaOne/CDMA2000 (Qualcomm's protocol suites based on CDMA modulation). If you are using a 3G network, you are using CDMA modulation, regardless of whether you are using UMTS (the protocol suite for 3G GSM, which moved from the GMSK modulation used for 2G/2.5G GSM networks to a CDMA based modulation scheme), or CDMA2000 1xEV-DO (Qualcomm's 3G protocol suite.)
Yeah, and lack of time sync sounds more like a phone issue than a network issue.
If we really wanted an apples-to-apples comparison of EDGE vs. 3G performance, we'd need a comparison done on the same phone with the same browser, for example maybe an HTC TyTn II with one of the "bandswitch" apps that allows UMTS to be forced on and off.
Whether it is built into the motherboard or is built into the chipset itself, it almost always still has an "internal only" PCI, AGP, or PCI-E interface, and is thus affected by the performance limitations of that interface.