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