Devices (was Re: Preupgrade change?)

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2010-11-01 at 13:26 -0500, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> Adam Williamson wrote:
> > The N900 is unfortunately impractical in territories with no 1700 or
> > 2100 band providers (or poor ones).
> 
> For 3G, yes, but I live with 2.5G service as I'm almost always near a 
> WLAN AP. (I don't have 1700 or 2100 service near me). The N900 should be 
> able to provide voice calling from anywhere in the world.
> 
> The frequency issue will be "fixed" with quad-band 3G MeeGo devices next 
> year.

Oh, believe me, I'm waiting. (Comprehensive 3G support is actually still
annoyingly rare; go chart out the availability of devices that can do
850/1900/2100 3G, it's still a surprisingly short list which gets
rapidly shorter when you start keying in requirements like 'runs a
decent version of Android' and 'has a good hardware keyboard'. This is
mainly why I still use a somewhat antiquated Tilt 2.) I'm certainly not
always near a WLAN AP; one of the most useful smartphone features for me
is Google maps public transit navigation, and there ain't a WLAN AP on
any city buses around here. =)

> Even then, 3G carriers are overloaded and can hardly provide quality 
> service to stream video or download faster than EDGE-speeds. Video 
> calling is also a moot point as no USA carrier offers it and the 
> countries that do offer it, offer it at a high expense. You're better 
> off using Skype or XMPP via WLAN on the N900 for that. ;)

Well, 'speak for yourself'. I get a pretty constant high-quality 4Mb/sec
connection over HSPA here. It's hugely faster than EDGE, and I really
would not want to step down to 2G (actually before reliable 3G was
available I ran a Palm for a short while but then ditched it because I
just can't deal with the slowness of 2G data and I never used the
smartphone features; it took a decent 3G connection for me to really get
to the point of using smartphone stuff.)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net