| 18th October - Amid the hype and
noise of the Apple iPhone launch in Europe, one of the main points of contention
has been the lack of 3G in the device. Many expected the European version
of the wonder phone to ship with a higher speed data connection and some operators
even grumbled that lack of 3G was what turned them off the device, although this
was probably sour grapes. But one consultancy thinks that the lack of 3G
won't do Apple any harm at all. In fact, US-based consultancy and analyst firm
Blackfriars Communications, reckons EDGE might even have the... well, edge, over
3G. Blackfriars analyst Carl Howe, said that bandwidth doesn't affect the
mobile phone experience nearly as much as most people think. And in some cases,
high bandwidth internet is actually worse for the user than low bandwidth. Howe
said the main issue is that people often confuse network bandwidth with latency.
The gist of this argument is that because mobile phone networks use narrow band
radio signals, loading web pages on a 3G phone may actually take about the same
amount of time as an EDGE network. High bandwidth radio networks also tend to
be more error prone. A better known fact is that high bandwidth networks
drain batteries quicker. Generally speaking, if a device wants to connect to a
network ten times faster, the device will consume 100 times the power - a problem
that has long dogged the development of 3G devices. Finally, Howe notes
that the processor/OS/software combination is just as important to the user experience
as anything. If the device can't keep up with the data transmission speed of the
network then all that extra bandwidth is for nothing. "Just as the
computer industry finally figured out that more gigahertz wasn't necessarily better
for users, the phone industry is going to discover the same point (and for the
same reasons)," said Howe. "And companies that use limited bandwidth
in smarter ways to deliver a better user experience - like Apple - are going to
have a leg up on their competitors no matter what network they use," he said.
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