CrunchGear

No 3G iPhone –> iPhone dead in Europe. As simple as that.

Bye egghat

Yes, Apple simply has to have 3G for the rest of the world. It’s too vast a market to ignore. Besides, isn’t AT&T beavering away at expanding their 3G?
And it’s not the battery technology that will be the breakthrough, but the energy efficient chips - and they’ll be here later this year.

Apple has to release a 3G iPhone for the Asian countries. I don’t think they have any EDGE networks. Besides, there is no reason why Apple can’t release a 3G iPhone now that there are low-power 3G chips in production. Maybe Apple was waiting for advances in battery technology also. That skinny profile that the iPhone has to offer is definitely going to cause problems of cramming features and having good battery life. Thin may be in, but at a very high cost.

I’ll really be surprised if there is a 3G iPhone within a couple of months. June at the earliest. I sure hope Apple’s quality control is up to snuff. Every little flaw the iPhone shows will hurt Apple’s stock price. I sure hope it’s just lack of 3G that’s hurting iPhone sales. Once that hurdle is past maybe iPhone sales will explode overseas.

I would be happy to be done with all the speculation, and hearing all the people moaning incessantly about something that, when you step back and take an objective look at it, is devoid of usefulness.

I’m tired of 3g - for how many years have we been hearing about, about its promised innovations, its miraculous data speeds, blah blah blah. The carriers failed to deliver when they had the chance (recall, 3g was around before wifi was ubiquitous). Now they’re talking about 4g!

For me (and, I suspect, an increasingly large % of the mobile phone community) wifi is the present, and wimax is the future. In my weaker moments, I’ve honestly wondered if other US carriers / european carriers are purposely pushing the ‘3g iphone’ drive as a means of guerilla warfare against AT&T.

I’m sure many will disagree. However, I’m just as sure that 10 years from now, we won’t be using terms like 3g, 4g, EDGE, GSM, HDPSA (or whatever it is). It will all be based on wireless protocools which originated, back in the misty days of the late 90s / early 2000s as 802.11b. For data access and communication (via VOIP)

The quicker this happens, the better.

This is total garbage. The iPod Touch, focus on WiFi theory makes sense, but none of the rest of it does. AT&T just announced that they’ve added a ton of new markets to their 3G coverage - they’re not about to go all “Hey, F*** 3G, WiFi RULEZ!” now. And that whole “Europe spits on EDGE” business. Come on CrunchGear, first you post that “Sony Ericsson might just maybe make a Windows Mobile phone” more than 24 hours after they unveil the Xperia X1 (running, yes, WinMob 6), and now this? What’s up with you today?

I think this column is brilliant. There has been talk as long as there has been wi-fi to make cities wi-fil, why not? Screw 3g and wait for 4G. I know the rest of the world wants 3g, but with that said, doesn’t the rest of the world have wi-fi too? The US didn’t corner the market on wi-fi did we? 4 G is three years away at the most, you are telling me that if Apple comes up with a whole bunch of add-ons to the phone that they won’t be able to sell phones in the US? I have had one for a while and while it isn’t perfect, it is better than any other phone for internet and e-mail attachments (note that I didn’t say better at e-mail, I know how good blackberrys are) one complaint about the iPhone is the internal antenna, it isn’t strong enough. I own both a Blackberry and an iPhone and where I don’t have coverage with the iPhone, I almost always have coverage with the Blackberry.

Maybe we in the US are too caught up on what something doesn’t have and don’t focus enough on what it does have (Insert any device) and maybe that way of thinking is good in prompting companies to get out the stuff we want, but until the iPhone came out, I didn’t actually know that’s what I wanted.

I still think the original column is brilliant. Screw the traditonal ways and the wireline companies…they don’t care, maybe this 700mhz thing will change it all…FC

dude, if we could all live in the world you described that’d be great. but “screw the wireline companies” is only gonna get you a busy signal, sad as it is to say.

>There has been talk as long as there has been wi-fi to make cities wi-fil, why not?

oh, and when that earthlink muni wi-fi thing gets dug up from its grave, watered, and then goes through, lemme know, k? thanks.

This rumor started when UK Macworld made the mistake of referring to WiMax as WiFi and then Macenstein picked it up and decided that we would all benefit substantially from a nationwide network of access points with a range of 300 meters. Granted there are methods to convert a normal 2.4ghz WiFi signal to 700 or 900mhz like the Ubiquiti SR9, but it requires hardware on both the access point and client side. Such a network would be completely incompatible with all current forms of WiFi including the iPhone. Now a future version of the iPhone with WiMax capability would definitely be something to see, but it won’t happen before the 3G version.

Just to clarify, if 700mhz could replace the old model for making wi-fi available to all citizens of the US, then do it and screw 3g for an iPhone. With that said, we didn’t know how 700mhz was to be used 3-5 years ago, now we do know what can really be done. Tell me, why redo all of your towers 3G if you can wi-fi stuff? Why make someone wait on 3G when wi-fi is faster? Why not write your senator and let him/her know what can be done now and that wires everywhere aren’t what we need?

All I want is to ask the questions and in my job I do…maybe you shoule too jj.

FC