Myth Busting FTW

[Clinton Ebadi]

Daniel Eran <danieleran at gmail.com> writes:


> TMobile only owns 1900 MHz  transponders, which are high enough to be
> problematic. That means subscribers have to roam on AT&T to use 850 MHz.

1900 is the standard US frequency, and 850 is the non-standard. My
nearly four year old tri-band European phone Just Works (tm) on
T-Mobile which is why I got T-Mobile; it was painful having to wait
*years* for 850 versions of phones to be released in the US (which is
luckily not so much of an issue now).

What is wrong with 1900? I've never had any issues even when five
years ago in the Carolinas when the Cingular and T-Mobile coverage
areas were really crap. I suspect your phone has a bad antenna as the
tower being a few meters taller really shouldn't affect the signal
much when you can be a mile or so away.

AT&T also has a significant amount of 1900. Their entire network in
the Carolinas is 1900 at least (I know as I travel there often and I
can roam without issue and my phone does not do 850).

> even smaller market than AT&T's US version of UMTS. T-Mobile uses
> non-standard frequencies that only a quad band phone could use, and
> then only hitting on one cylinder out of four. I've been a T-Mobile
> customer for years,

One cyclinder out of four? Please explain what you mean by this. If
you mean that the data transfer speeds or some such are slow becuse
you can't allocate all slots at once I think you are wrong. I am on a
GPRS connection right now, and I generally get the fully 40 k/s down
that my device is capable of except around nine p.m. or so (I'm
guessing when everyone jumps on to use their 'free' time).

> No I'm not. I had more to say about FIC than OpenMoko. I'm just
> pointing out that buying an FIC phone isn't sticking it to Microsoft
> in any sense beyond buying a Dell Windows PC and then installing
> Linux. It has no market effect at all.

How does buying a phone that is capable of running Windows mobile help
*or* hurt Microsoft? They are not getting a Windows license fee from
the hardware. Your analogy does not hold -- Microsoft gets money when
you buy a machine with Windows installed. The Neo1973 is more like
buying an os-less machine. Your conclusion that there is no market
effect does mostly hold, but at the same time there seems to be a
slight effect: the gta01 Neo1973 appears to have sold at least two
full production runs and FIC is going ahead with the production of a
second revision. A few thousand devices being sold in a month shows
that there is some demand for a real GNU/Linux running phone, does it
not?