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Apple Phone in Early '07?
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Koodauw said:
I think the two of them are hard to compare. In this arguement, I'm not advocatinig CDMA, I'm just trying to show that there's no need to bash them as they are hard to compare.
CDMA and TDMA both get the job done; they divide up bandwidth so that multiple users can use a base station at the same time. They way they do that is just different. That cliche phrase of "comparing apples to oranges" applies to the age old question of GSM vs. CDMA.
iMacZealot said:
You're right it's just like the ages old Mac verses PC debate can't really compare them.
It really comes down to want you need to do and how much you are prepared to spend.
ezekielrage_99 said:
It's not even the technology's price that's the difference, that's decided by another company. it's the technologies that are hard to compare.
pengu said:
No, that's not true, though the way it's presented often makes you think it is.
Sprint and a company called MetroPCS are one of the few companies in the entire world where incoming calls are in practice are "at no extra charge" (unless those calls are long distance.)
That is, someone can call someone with a Sprint phone on a "free unlimited incoming" plan, and NEITHER PARTY will be charged (subject to restrictions, namely that mobile party isn't roaming, and the caller has unlimited outgoing calls to at the very least the mobile party's area/exchange code. This is the default with US landlines.)
(I'm being picky with words here, because it's even worse than how I'm describing. I'm not aware of a single phone company in the entire world that offers free calls of any description save for 911/112/999 type calls. Every phone company in the world at the very least requires you pay a subscription fee before receiving any kind of unmetered service. Ok, I note the complaints I'm being picky and everyone "knows" what "free" means, but I think the word "free" is overused.)
Most other operators in the US offer unlimited airtime at nights, weekends, and often when calls are placed between mobiles on the same network, so the other networks also provide incoming calls "at no extra charge" for a specific subset of incoming calls.
Now, you're probably not in the US, which explains your confusion as to why someone would be wording this as it was, but don't think that because where you are the callee doesn't pay for incoming calls, that this means the calls are free. They're not. They're paid for by the caller, often at absurdly high rates. Do you never make calls to mobiles?
You are just as likely to be receiving a call as making one to a mobile phone (ie regardless of who pays, YOU are likely to pay it. You receive calls on your cellphone, and you call people who have cellphones), so when considering the total cost of ownership, the price of incoming calls, whether paid for by the caller or callee, makes a difference in terms of the use of mobile phones.
Because this is likely to descend to a debate on the subject of "Caller pays" or "Mobile user pays", the US system makes it harder to have a workable low-budget pay-as-you-go system, but once service-spends exceed around $40 a month, the provided tariffs are generally much, much, better value than that provided outside of the US. So there's a higher barrier to entry, but once you can afford it, even the most avid talkers can use it as their default phone. A typical tariff in the US is $50 a month for unlimited nights, weekends, and calls between same-network mobiles, plus 500 minutes for other call types. A typical tariff in the UK appears to be something approximating to 20-70c a minute for outgoing calls (the lower end for same network or landline calls, higher for calls to mobiles), with calls charged by the second and no, practical, monthly minimum call spends and everyone paying just for the calls they make. Someone who doesn't use a mobile phone very often would appreciate the latter, someone who wants to use it instead of a landline would appreciate the former.
Koodauw said:
(Before I begin, quick terminology comment: I'm going to avoid "CDMA" and use the term "IS-95" instead - I try to avoid using terms like "CDMA" and "TDMA" because it generally confuses people. Many think the next version of GSM, UMTS, is actually IS95, because it incorporates a CDMA air interface called W-CDMA, for instance. Others think GSM is the same thing as the D-AMPS/IS-136 system used by (the various phone companies that became) Cingular until they started moving to GSM because both have a "TDMA" air interface and IS-136 is usually called "TDMA".) In practice, UMTS and IS95 have almost nothing in common, UMTS is a revision of GSM, and GSM has almost nothing in common with IS-136. )
There's no way to compare the two. Both IS-95 and GSM implement a variety of different codecs that are provided differently by different operators. In the area I live, Cingular (GSM) tries to force many phones to use something called AMR-HR, which has "acceptable" voice quality when you have good reception, and drops to barely incomprehensable with any deterioration in signal strength. T-Mobile (GSM) clearly doesn't, and I can talk and listen to someone with both of us sounding like we're on a landline with one bar of signal. On the same phone.
Likewise, Verizon (IS-95) uses some awful bitrate codec for its network where I live (I believe they're heavily oversubscribed here) where pretty much everyone sounds like they're dying from some serious lung problem, and Sprint PCS (IS-95 too) doesn't and generally the call quality, at medium to good reception, seems pretty much ok. Sub-landline, but not seriously so.
With the variety of voice codecs the operators use, you can't really make a fair judgement merely on the basis of network technology. Either the operator's cheap, or it isn't. IS-95 was chosen by many networks on the basis that it's spectrum efficient (ie it's cheap), but on the other hand Sprint PCS was always content with call drops when I used it to handle network overloading rather than seriously compromising on call quality. Cingular's move to GSM has caused problems in that it's using a significantly less spectrum efficient technology than the technology it replaced, so Cingular's had to, in many places, hopefully temporarily, use the crappy half-rate codecs to boost capacity until it can get more towers online.
I wouldn't use voice quality as a way to judge the technologies.
You are right. I make a call. i expect to pay for it. i dont expect the person im calling to get billed for the damn call.
and. as for pricing. yes, vodafone have a 1c/sec flat rate on calls. but. i pay $79/month and at the end of the my account has a automatic refund (of sorts) applied, so anything up to $500 in calls/txt/etc is included in the $79.
i DO use my mobile for most calls. i use my landline maybe once a week, because it has a better speakerphone if im using it for a long time.
and. as for pricing. yes, vodafone have a 1c/sec flat rate on calls. but. i pay $79/month and at the end of the my account has a automatic refund (of sorts) applied, so anything up to $500 in calls/txt/etc is included in the $79.
i DO use my mobile for most calls. i use my landline maybe once a week, because it has a better speakerphone if im using it for a long time.
pengu said:
The other way of looking at it is that the mobile user has made a technology choice. They shouldn't expect other people to pay for their technology choice. A system where each person pays to connect to the network and decides how they want to pay for that is inherently fairer, even if it makes it harder for people to choose to subsidize the systems of others.
(Remember too that in the majority of cases, most US users have a fixed bill because of the high number of bundled minutes coupled with the huge unmetered portions of their bills. It's not the case that we get billed for the incoming call in the majority of cases. If it's made at peak time, from a different network, then yeah, we'll use bundled minutes, but most of us end up with large amounts of bundled minutes free at the end of the month despite this. And you never have to accept an incoming call.)
That doesn't sound like a bad plan, that's unusually good outside of the US from what I've researched, though most of my research has been limited to the UK.
If I were back in Britain, I couldn't substitute a cellphone for a landline because of the incoming calls issue. It's simply not fair to my family or friends to make them pay through the nose to contact me. I might use one for the bulk of my outgoing calls, but for incoming calls, it wouldn't be right.
An ideal compromise, in my view, would be for the operators to provide two numbers on every phone, a caller pays and a mobile party pays (with the latter being treated as ordinary airtime, or unmetered according to a fixed monthly charge), but alas I don't think the operators would ever do something that could potentially undermine their interconnect revenues like that.
Neither solution is perfect. The US seems better at the moment because of the emphasis on unmetered usage. At least unmetered incoming calls are an option here. But the downside is the lack of a practical PAYG system.
JeffDM said:
By definition, 10MP phone cannot be as grainy as a 3MP phone. You do realize when someone says 10MegaPixel phone what they mean right?.
10 million pixels per square inch (before the tech police come out, this is a basic definition. I am aware an image does not have to be a square).
wnurse said:
its not 10 million pixels per square inch. 10 million pixels is the overall size of the image ie x by y, at about 150-300 dpi, i think, but its defo not 10mp per inch^2
but anything above 3-5 mp in a phone becomes a useless waste because the sensor is stupid small.
matt
Verizon and Sprint have used EVRC (Enhanced Variable Rate Codec) for several years now. EVRC, in turn, replaced QCELP (a.k.a. Qualcomm PureVoice). Down the road we should see EVRC replaced by SMV (Selectable Mode Vocoder), 4GV (Qualcomm's Fourth Generation Vocoder), or VMR-WB.peharri said:
Well said! People must understand that the codecs for digital phones in use today were originally designed to squeeze voice through a very narrow upstream pipe—typically 9.6kbps and under—resulting in different approaches to the problem of quality vs. bandwidth given the processing power available in phone chipsets at the time. Now that upstream data bandwidth and portable processing power are becoming less of a problem, we should start hearing improvements as newer codecs are adopted by the carriers in the phones they sell their customers. And I'm sure they'll trumpet the fact when they do.peharri said:
whatever and whenever it shall be, it won't be too soon.
I just will buy it, hopefully we can do so, unlocked, independently of the carrier. Today's phone are just plain crup.
Unfortunately it will have a camera, it appears, which really sux, I hate those cell phone cameras especially here in the US where we are so behind that they charge you a fortune to send pics with the phone.
I just will buy it, hopefully we can do so, unlocked, independently of the carrier. Today's phone are just plain crup.
Unfortunately it will have a camera, it appears, which really sux, I hate those cell phone cameras especially here in the US where we are so behind that they charge you a fortune to send pics with the phone.
A 10megapixel phone will record more clearly the low quality picture that comes from these tiny lenses.wnurse said:
It will be a much larger file, and won't look much better than a 3MP. Still, as the lenses improve this will change.
GregA said:
There IS a limit as to what can be done at a given price point. Eventually the cost of a good lens for it will outweigh the benefits.
Sticking a 10mp sensor in a phone to me is ridiculous. Very few people ever need 10mp, and if they do they get a real camera instead. Not only does the phone have a very limited set of potential lens features, but the lens will generally be low quality and poorly corrected unless you spend a significant amount of money for a good one. Even then size will become an issue.
All a 10mp phone will do is be unusable in anything but superb light. It'll probably have even worse dynamic range than existing phones, record murky detail, and have the poorest signal to noise ratio on the planet.
...the bar was suddenly raised
Nokia will according to a swedish site will release their first true GPS cellphone (integrated GPS reciever) within two weeks.
If Apple want to enter the cellphone market they better get going...
Nokia will according to a swedish site will release their first true GPS cellphone (integrated GPS reciever) within two weeks.
If Apple want to enter the cellphone market they better get going...
iMacZealot said:
Finally, someone gets it right.
CDMA is technically superior to GSM just about any way you care to measure it. GSM's widespread adoption in Europe was by fiat as a protectionist measure for European telecom companies, primarily because the European technology providers did not want to license CDMA from an American company. CDMA was basically slandered six ways to Sunday to justify using GSM. It was nothing more than a case of Not Invented Here writ large and turf protection. This early rapid push to standardize on GSM in as many places as possible as a strategic hedge gave them a strong market position in most of the rest of the world. In the US, the various protocols had to fight it out on the open market which took time to sort itself out.
Ultimately, the GSM consortium lost and Qualcomm got the last laugh because the technology does not scale as well as CDMA. Every last telecom equipment provider in Europe has since licensed the CDMA technology, and some version of the technology is part of the next generation cellular infrastructure under a few different names.
While GSM has better interoperability globally, I would make the observation that CDMA works just fine in the US, which is no small region of the planet and the third most populous country. For many people, the better quality is worth it.
tortoise said:
I find a few things wrong with this:
1) I don't think EU chose GSM because it was European and not American --- according to Wikipedia, GSM publicly came out in 1990 and CDMA (or IS-95) in 1996.
2) I think it's hard to compare IS-95 and GSM. It's comparing apples to oranges. Sure, there are some things better about them, but CDMA and TDMA are completely different techniques and hard to compare.
3) When you're talking about CDMA being used in future technologies in Europe, if you mean UMTS, that's not CDMA. It's the next generation GSM 3G technology, but uses wideband CDMA or WCDMA in the process. It is considered GSM technology.
4) If you're choosing your new cellular provider based on whether they use CDMA or GSM, that's sad because you're going to get a phone that makes calls anyway. The rest, in my opinion, differs between what the execs at T-Cingizon PCS are thinking.
Address Book Capacity
Let's hope there is the ability to import large address books with multiple contact numbers. Most cell phones allow you up to 500 contacts; some up to 1,000 (with a maximum of three numbers per contact).
The memory is there for the music, allow Power Users the choice of dedicating it to contact numbers and other data. The only other option is to carry around a bulky PDA phone.
Let's hope there is the ability to import large address books with multiple contact numbers. Most cell phones allow you up to 500 contacts; some up to 1,000 (with a maximum of three numbers per contact).
The memory is there for the music, allow Power Users the choice of dedicating it to contact numbers and other data. The only other option is to carry around a bulky PDA phone.
tortoise said:
There's a lot of nonsense about IS-95 ("CDMA" as implemented by Qualcomm) that's promoted by Qualcomm shills (some openly, like Steve De Beste) that I'd be very careful about taking claims of "superiority" at face value. The above is so full of the kind mis-representations I've seen posted everywhere I have to respond.
1. CDMA is not "technically superior to GSM just about any way you care to measure". CDMA (by which I assume you mean IS95, because comparing GSM to CDMA air interface technology is like comparing a minivan to a car tire - the conflation of TDMA and GSM has, and the deliberate underplaying of the 95% of IS-95 that has nothing to do with the air-interface, has been a standard tool in the shills toolbox) has an air-interface technology which has better capacity than GSM's TDMA, but the rest of IS-95 really isn't as mature or consumer friendly as GSM. In particular, IS-95 leaves decisions as to support for SIM cards, and network codes, to operators, which means in practice that there's no standardization and few benefits to an end user who chooses it. Most US operators seem to have, surprise surprise, avoided SIM cards and network standardization seems to be based upon US analog dialing star codes (eg *72, etc)
2. "GSM's widespread adoption in Europe was by fiat as a protectionist measure for European telecom companies, primarily because the European technology providers did not want to license CDMA from an American company." is objectively untrue. GSM was developed in the mid-eighties as a method to move towards a standardized mobile phone system for Europe, which at the time had different systems running on different frequencies in pretty much every country (unlike the US where AMPS was available in every state.)
By the time IS-95 was developed, GSM was already an established standard in practically all of Europe. While 900MHz services were mandated as GSM and legacy analogy only by the EC, countries were free to allow other standards on other frequencies until one became dominant on a particular frequency. With 1800MHz, the first operators given the band choose GSM, as it was clearly more advanced than what Qualcomm was offering, and handset makers would have little or no difficulty making multifrequency handsets. (Today GSM is also mandated on 1800MHz, but that wasn't true at the time one2one and Orange, and many that followed, choose GSM.)
The only aspect of IS95 that could be described as "superior" that would require licensing is the CDMA air interface technology. European operators and phone makers have, indeed, licensed that technology (albeit not to Qualcomm's specifications) and it's present in pretty much all implementations of UMTS. So much for that.
3. "CDMA was basically slandered six ways to Sunday to justify using GSM." Funny, I could have sworn I saw the exact opposite.
I came to the US in 1998, GSM wasn't available in my market area at the time, and I picked up an IS-95 phone believing it to be superior based upon what was said on newsgroups, US media, and other sources. I was shocked. IS-95 was better than IS-136 ("D-AMPS"), but not by much, and it was considerably less reliable. At that time, IS-95, as providing by most US operators, didn't support two way text messaging or data. It didn't support - much to my astonishment - SIM cards. ISDN integration was nil. Network services were a jumbled mess. Call drops were common, even when signal strengths were high.
Much of this has been fixed since. But what amazed me looking back on it was the sheer nonsense being directed at GSM by IS-95 advocates. GSM was, according to them, identical to IS-136, which they called TDMA. It had identical problems. Apparently on GSM, calls would drop every time you changed tower. GSM only had a 7km range! It only worked in Europe because everyone lives in cities! And GSM was a government owned standard, imposed by the EU on unwilling mobile phone operators.
Every single one of these facts was completely untrue. IS-136 was closer in form to IS-95 than GSM. IS-136, unlike GSM and like IS-95, was essentially built around the same mobile phone model as AMPS, with little or no network services standardization and an inherent assumption that the all calls would be to POTS or other similarly limited cellphones as itself. Like IS-95 and unlike GSM, in IS-136 your phone was your identifier, you couldn't change phones without your operator's permission. Like IS-95 at the time, messaging and data was barely implemented in IS-136 - when I left the UK I'd been browsing the web and using IRC (via Demon's telnetable IRC client) on my Nokia 9000 on a regular basis.
No TDMA system I'm aware of routinely drops calls when you change towers. In practice, I had far more call drops under Sprint PCS then I had under any other operator, namely because IS-95's capacity improvement was over-exaggerated and operators at the time routinely overloaded their networks.
GSM's range, which is around 20km, while technically a limitation of the air interface technology, isn't much different to what a .25W cellphone's range is in practice. You're not going to find many cellphones capable of getting a signal from a tower that far, regardless of what technology you use. The whole "Everyone lives in cities" thing is a myth, as certain countries, notably Finland, have far more US-like demographics in that respect (but what do they know about cellphones in Finland?)
GSM was a standard built by the operators after the EU told them to create at least one standard that would be supported across the continent. Only the concept of "standardization" was forced upon operators, the standard - a development of work being done by France Telecom at the time - was made and agreed to by the operators. Those same operators would have looked at IS-95, or even at CDMA incorporated into GSM at the air interface level - had it been a mature, viable, technology at the time. It wasn't.
The only practical advantage IS-95 had over GSM was better capacity. This in theory meant cheaper minutes. For a time, that was true. Today, most US operators offer close to identical tariffs and close to identical reliability. But I can choose which GSM phone I leave the house with, and I know it'll work consistantly regardless of where I am.
This paragraph is bizarrely misleading and I'm wondering if you just worded it poorly. GSM is still the worldwide standard. The newest version, UMTS, uses a CDMA air interface but is otherwise a clear development of GSM. It has virtually nothing in common with IS-95. "The GSM consortium" consists of GSM operators and handset makers. They're doing pretty well. What have they lost? Are you saying that because GSM's latest version includes one aspect of the IS-95 standard that GSM is worse? Or that IS-95 is suddenly better?
Given the choice between 2G IS-95 or GSM, I'd pick GSM every time. Given the choice between 3G IS-95 (CDMA2000) and UMTS, I'd pick UMTS every time. The quality is generally better with the GSM equivalent - you're getting a well designed, digitial, integrated, network with GSM with all the features you'd expect. The advantages of the IS-95 equivalent are harder to come by. Slightly better data rates with 3G seems to be the only major one. Well, maybe the only one. Capacity? That's an operator issue. Indeed, with the move to UMA (presumably there'll be an IS-95 equivalent), it wouldn't surprise me if operators need less towers in the future regardless of which network technology they picked. The only other "advantages" IS-95 brings to the table seem to be imaginary.
hijacking the thread
sorry to interrupt on the network discussion, but has anyone got anything new to share/discuss on the iPhone (unless I read the thread wrong)?
Can it really offer all that functionality (from the patent report) in a candybar style phone, or will they have to release two - a funtional one, for ipodding/texting/phoning; and a pda for office work on the move (& everything else?
sorry to interrupt on the network discussion, but has anyone got anything new to share/discuss on the iPhone (unless I read the thread wrong
)?Can it really offer all that functionality (from the patent report) in a candybar style phone, or will they have to release two - a funtional one, for ipodding/texting/phoning; and a pda for office work on the move (& everything else?
iPhone?
i think LG's new phone is quite similar.
http://xataka.com/archivos/2006/09/25-lg-sb610-otro-movil-extrafin.php
i think LG's new phone is quite similar.
http://xataka.com/archivos/2006/09/25-lg-sb610-otro-movil-extrafin.php