Why I need a 3G iPhone and a cheap sub-notebook

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 05 March 2008 09:12

Business IT - Technology

The first area where HTC Dual Touch 850 excelled was as a voice device. Our conference was being held at a resort on the Sunshine Coast of Australia, which is a notoriously bad reception area for cellphone coverage, especially for 2G phones. The HTC Dual Touch 850, however, was on Telstra's 3.5G HSDPA network, which has comparably good coverage, and voice calls were reliable and crystal clear.

The second area where I was grateful for the HTC phone was Internet connectivity. I don't mean browsing on the phone because I'm not a fan of web browsing on a small hand held - even on the iPhone with its comparatively good screen, accelerometer and multi-touch capabilities. What I mean is using the phone to give my notebook computer a good Internet connection.

Quite simply the HTC Dual Touch 850 on Telstra's HSDPA NextG network gave me a spectacularly good Internet connection when I plugged it into a USB port of my notebook.

Everywhere I looked at the conference there were journalists using dedicated 3G mobile data cards plugged into their laptops enabling them to connect to the net remotely. Yet most of these same journalists also had 3G mobile phones. In other words a lot of journalists had one 3G device too many.

Watching all of this unfold and putting my own experience into perspective tells me that the minute Apple releases a 3G iPhone I want one. I don't want it just for entertainment purposes. I want to use it as my only pocket mobile communications device. I want it to make good quality phone calls. I want to use it as my notebook's wireless broadband modem (if only Apple would officially allow this, something it doesn't with the current 2G model) and as my mobile email device.

From a usability perspective, the iPhone kills anything else on the market. However, it needs to be 3G to replace all my superfluous other mobile devices.

The other thing I noticed on my conference was an increasing number of journalists using sub-notebooks, including one who was using an Asus Eee PC. This together with a little demo machine  on display from Lenovo led me to my next realisation.