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By Dr.
Philip Baczewski, Director of Academic Computing and User Services
It's week three of the
iPhone era and things spotted
flying through the air might be old dumb cell phones that have
been supplanted by the new super phone from Apple, known to the public
as the mild-mannered iPhone.
Perhaps there are still a few regular-old cell phones out there, but
Apple
reportedly did sell over 500,000 of the devices over the first
three days after its release on June 29. The question still remains,
however, whether the iPhone inherits the legacy of the iPod, or of the
Newton.
One thing is obvious. The iPhone represents another step in the
direction of device
convergence. Is the iPhone a phone with WiFi Internet access or a
WiFi Internet access device with a phone? Is it a PDA with a phone or
a phone with a camera? From what I've observed, based on limited
interaction with the iPhone, is that the most desirable way to access
the Internet is via WiFi, and it is a really useful portable Internet
device. So, it's not surprising that from day one, some people have
been "hacking"
the iPhone in attempts to make its WiFi and non-phone applications
work without activation of an AT&T service plan. This has been taken
on as a
project by some, apparently
accomplished
by others, and
documented elsewhere.
It's good that the iPhone is a handy WiFi device, because Cingular/AT&T
wireless services has for some time been considered the generally
worst cellular service available, or at least, not the
best. AT&T seems to have a technology disadvantage for true
wireless convergence. There are basically two kinds of cell phone
technologies used in the U.S. AT&T and T-Mobile use the
GSM standard which is widely employed in Europe and other areas
outside the U.S. Verizon and Sprint PCS employ the
CDMA standard. Both
support data networking via their cellular networks. The
EDGE standard used on GSM cellular networks like AT&T supports
data transfer rates up to about 250 kilobits per second. That's about
4 times slower than the CDMA
EVDO standard supports
on networks such as Sprint PCS or Verizon. EDGE is about 40 times
slower than your average
802.11b WiFi network.
So, if you ignore the cool user interface features of the iPhone, like
the automatic screen orientation and the fingertip controls and the
high-quality graphics and the built-in iPod capability, do you need a
phone at all? Nokia, ironically enough, doesn't think so (at least in
one case.) The well-known cell phone manufacturer has produced an
Internet tablet named the
N800 that is a WiFi Internet access device that runs Linux as its
operating system. The N800 features an 800X480 (single orientation)
touch-sensitive screen with an on-screen keyboard. Unlike the iPhone,
the N800 comes with two SD card slots, but with only 256 MB of storage
(the iPhone features 4GB or 8GB of storage.) Unlike the iPhone, the
N800 will run Flash and features a full suite of Linux-native
applications.
So now the question is, if your Internet tablet that is slightly
larger than your Internet phone can run a
VOIP application like
Skype, how soon until you don't need
cellular service at all? That would depend upon how soon WiFi is as
ubiquitous as cellular service. The City of San Francisco has planned
a ubiquitous WiFi network, however, their public geekyness seems to
butting up against their radical greenness. Cellular providers are
apparently nervous about competition as seen by AT&T's
reaction to a proposal that the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction
(left over when TV broadcast all move to
HD) carry with it an
"open access" clause allowing services other than cellular to use the
spectrum.
Free or even for-pay WiFi is not ubiquitous (if you don't count the
open access points found in apartment complexes.) Someday, however,
there will be a
Starbucks
on every corner and that problem will be solved. Until then, it would
be handy to have cellular data service. But, will the excellent WiFi
performance of the iPhone actually cause people to talk less on their
cell phones? I wonder if AT&T has an answer to that question?
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