Yeah. I can just hear Giacomm (sp?) jumping in on this one. We haven't had a good 4G arguement lately. -Jay
I just can't wait till my magical 4G phone drives to the store all by itself and buys me a beer... LOL... Sometimes I miss Giacomm...
The problem with all of these advanced standards is that whilst they have the capacity to deliver various futuristic services, the hardware has to catch up too. Surfing the net at 100 Mbps sounds great, but we all know that a mobile phone's screen is less than ideal for viewing webpages. What about battery life? What about memory capacity? Then of course there is the price. If you look at 3G, one of the most popular services is music. Music is relatively easy to do; it take sup a relatively small amount of memory compared with video and doesn't require much in the way of advanced hardware, just a pair of headphones and the appropriate software/firmware on the handset. If the networks want to get the same results with video, webpages and other such content then we need to see hardware improvements.
Wirelessly posted (HTC-8100/1.2 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320)) While I don't neccesssarily agree, since cingular video service works well, the hardware currently is in dire need of catching up anyways. But to be quite honest beyond 3g typical enhancements only relate to pc connections as I see it currently. I also think that carriers will most likely be marketing/selling tabletpc's by the time 4g starts to come out. Consumer use of bandwith has always come behind business use.
Assuming 4g delivers the speed and assuming all the hardware catches up to the needs, there's still one major problem: where are the batteries to support these services? Everyday, newer, more feature-rich phones come out, but everyday we see battery times decrease. Batteries have not shrinked in size in years and they have not increased the mAh either, yet hardware power consumption keeps going up. The standard for most regular phones has not changed from 700mAh to 900mAh for years with some minor exceptions. Just imagine: Data speeds are quickly going up in recent years. Higher data speeds require quicker hardware. Quicker hardware will require more processing power. More processing power will eat up more battery energy. So, forget about the hardware! That's the easy part! It is the batteries that need some massive catching up to do!
It's not a question of the service working well, rather it is more to do with the hardware being able to make the most of the service. For example, using a mobile phone to browse webpages is far from ideal, even using Opera Mobile. The screens needs to be bigger or a new way of displaying information needs to be implemented to ease the problem. I imagine that 100 Mbps connections will make services even better, but the hardware does have to keep. We have seen certain hardware features marching along e.g. cameras and connectivity options, but in some areas we need to see some drastic improvement in my opinion. Display technology is something I would like to see advance because I feel that it really holds back the mobile internet. Battery life is another area I would like to see improvement in, certainly as more and more features are crammed into handsets.
