There's no question that today's iPhone a oucement is huge news both for A le fa and the wirele industry in general. A le has beat my (and I su ect almost everyone else's) expectatio in almost all areas, save one--the cellular technology they've chosen to integrate with the iPhone. For those of you who may not know EDGE is a so-called 2.75G technology and not one of the new 3G technologies now being rolled out by most of the big cell carriers. The u hot of this is much lower bandwidth than 3G standards like EVDO (on Verizon and rint and other CDMA providers) and UMTS/HSDPA (on Cingular and other GSM providers). The analogy many people use is that EDGE is more like dial-up and HSDPA is more like broadband. EDGE tends to get real world eeds in the range of 70K to 135K (on a good day), while wifi is of course much faster (real world is generally about half of the rated eed, so about 27M for 802.11g).The Keynote seemed to demo trate pretty quick downloads on the iPhone, but the real question is how fast things will be on the EDGE network rather than via wifi. Obviously the inclusion of wifi mitigates the problem when you're in range of a base station, but I'm really curious to see how data inte ive services like Google ma and web browsing really work when you're on Cingular's network.
A final question will be Cingular's data pricing: will there be an affordable all you can eat data plan for the iPhone?. We're so used to seeing A le push the technology envelope in other areas, it really seems like a strange choice to integrate last generation wideband technology in its new flagship product. Of course, none of this is going to stop me from getting one. What do you think?
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