So Who Really Needs a 3G Phone ?
The title is controversial. And so is the subject of 3G mobile. Anyway, after eight years of 3G I should never ask... But the reality is different and sometimes it is good to ask. What prompted me to post on this subject was my decision last Friday to change my mobile service provider from T-Mobile (Era in Poland) to Orange. No no, the switch is not over yet. There will be more episodes in The Switch saga. Today I am still with T-Mobile, but the decision has already been made.So yes, I am dropping my fantastic Blackberry Bold 9000... The phenomenal, the best piece of hardware I have ever had. And believe me there is absolutely nothing wrong with the Bold itself. It is the service provider to blame. The reasons are described in details in The Episode 4, so I will not be repeating them here. My next gadget will be the Blackberry Curve 8900 provisioned by Orange. A big unknown. Absolutely no guarantee, it will work as intended. I tried to push Orange to check all the details of the setup. I failed. All they could say was the 8900 was a new model and they did not have much experience with it. It is available on reorder only, so no try-and-buy either. Pay-and-pray instead. That is exactly what I do now. I will share my experience with you here, probably in two weeks time. Until then let us focus on today's subject.
The curve 8900 is not a 3G phone. It has 2G GSM (including 2,5G EDGE) and Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi on the 8900 and Orange are the magnetic part of the proposition, as they offer UMA, or Unlicensed Mobile Access, allowing the UMA-compliant handset to connect to the GSM core network over Wi-Fi tunnel. I live in a place where any GSM reception is marginal in Winter and non-existent in Summer when there are leaves on the surrounding trees. So UMA is potentially a good alternative for me. Up to this day there were not too many UMA - compliant handsets, but the Curve 8900 can handle UMA and I have a feeling it will be a subject of several new posts here :). UMA works fine on DSL connections that are not saturated, otherwise it suffers in quality and the only cure is a good QOS setup. I hope I can handle that on my DFL-800. Will tell you how to do it when I master the subject...
UMA has been attractive for me. And I have been glad to know BlackBerries support UMA. At least some of them. What I noticed was UMA and 3G exclude each other, at least when it comes to BlackBerry. Theoretically there should be no issue, as 3G runs in a different band than Wi-Fi. But probably the phone's software cannot handle multiple handovers from GSM to 3G to UMA and back. So when I decided to get a UMA-capable BlackBerry, all the 3G models were automatically excluded. It took me a while to think about the lack of 3G in a brand new phone I am buying in 2009. I went through all the scenarios I would need it:
- Video Calls. I used to believe strongly video calls would pick up. Unfortunately this has not happened and proably will not happen, at least based on the current 3G-324M 64kb cuircit channel standard. Video over 64kb is simply too bad for today's standards and it rips people off their privacy - video calls have to be speakerphone calls and everybody else around you hears the conversation. Nobody likes it. I don't.
- Data connectivity. I have a separate 3G USB modem I use as a mobile data transceiver for my laptop. I used to use my phone as a data modem sometime ago, but found this drained phone's battery too fast. Today it is a challenge to run the phone alone all day without recharging, so no need to drain it even faster with a laptop data connection. So I do not need 3G data in my phone. From my experience EDGE is just enough for the amounts of data the phone itself is able to consume (small screen, asynchronous email). Laptops are high speed data drainers, but they are not an issue since most of use use separate data modems.
- Call quality. Well the call quality theoretically should be better with 3G (more bandwidth, more modern codecs), but in practice it very rarely is. European 3G due to its 2100MHz frequency that has troubles penetrating building walls and due to the extremely complicated inter-system handoff to 2G/GSM very often drops active calls. This has been a big issue with the iPhone 3G and still is an issue with most other hardware, as the reason is not only in the terminals. It is... by design... (more details here: http://headworx.slupik.com/2008/08/iphone-3g-cell-breathing-and.html). Two weeks ago a friend of mine purchased the Google G1 @ T-Mobile. It is being advertised as the phone designed for the mobile Internet, what may be true. It is definitely not designed for voice conversations, as over ten minutes we talked, he dropped six times, promising he was returning the phone back to the shop... as the dropped calls were a huge issue. I advised him turning 3G off and it helped. A lot.
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