lol, US is the most backwards country in the western world. Take a look outside US. Europe and eastern asia has had 3G for about 5 years, some parts of asia is testing with 4G.
3G phone migth not be so important in the US but many people will not accept a internet speed reduction by 90% if they buy a new smartphone.
lol, your postulate is naive, immature, and uninformed.
While, yes, it gets frustrating being in the US as a gadget freak, we don't get the latest gadgets for a few reasons:
(1) The US is a very large country. Japan can afford to rewire the entire country every 18 months for a new standard because it is the size of California. In the US it's a problem -- people are concentrated on the coasts near big cities and that's where new services typically start, but to build a complete network you have to get 80% of the country covered. That's very expensive and time consuming.
(2) In Europe, how was traditional wired phone service? Pretty poor, from what I understand. My wife has family in Poland that only now gets a wired phone into their house. The US has been well wired for over 100 years, so there is large market inertia in ISDN, DSL, IP phone, cell, etc. So ironically, being in a poorer country that didn't have good infrastructure to begin with is better because when you do get telecomm infrastructure it's easier to throw up some cell towers.
(3) Competing networks -- I'm going out on a limb here, but do the European/Asian markets have competing carriers and networks, or do they all share the same network infrastructure? Over here we have at least two competing networks and infrastructures -- AT&T/T-Mobile (GSM) and Sprint/Verizon (CDMA).
(4) Culture -- Japan readily throws out good technology for better technology. Outside of the early adopters, people in the US are less likely to do that.
I wish I had 3G in the iPhone, but most of the time I use it I'm in Wi-Fi coverage anyway (just wish it had SIPS/Voice-IP, but regardless, WiFi is faster than 3G as Steve Jobs says) and really 2.5G isn't that bad for me. A little slow but tolerable.
