andnothingofvaluewaslost

There's nothing better than driving to the local municipal airport, parking in the lot, and walking directly from the car to the plane (conveniently parked 100 yards away). No TSA, no jerks loudly talking on their cell phones, no one to destroy your luggage, and comfortable seating. Not to mention the "always a direct flight" perk.

Yes, I consider myself very lucky to have a relative (by marriage) with his own jet. God knows I couldn't afford one!

No kidding. Since you obviously don't understand where the CDMA in W-CDMA came from, I'll explain it. The WCDMA standard, for all intents and purposes, is just CDMA in 5 MHz bandwidth rather than CDMA's 1.25 MHz bandwidth. Sure, there are some goodies for interop between WCDMA and GSM (and some portions twiddled to lower royalties and such), but the tech is the same. The point of my original post was to show that GSM was a dead end technology as soon as CDMA was developed.

1 - I had to have a GSM phone (CDMA FTL!)

I personally find this hilarious on two counts:
1.) GSM and EDGE are TDMA technologies that are inferior in every way to the CDMA waveform.
2.) Your 3G service through AT&T is based off of CDMA. (All GSM carriers use W-CDMA for 3G service. See also #1.)

You forgot the aimbot hackers that are in 1 in 4 games. That, by far, is the most irritating part of the multi-player experience. While it's easy to tell (thank you kill-cam) it's just irritating after getting connection to host errors 3 games in a row.

Patent 7,479,949:

Abstract:
A computer-implemented method for use in conjunction with a computing device with a touch screen display comprises: detecting one or more finger contacts with the touch screen display, applying one or more heuristics to the one or more finger contacts to determine a command for the device, and processing the command. The one or more heuristics comprise: a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a one-dimensional vertical screen scrolling command, a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a two-dimensional screen translation command, and a heuristic for determining that the one or more finger contacts correspond to a command to transition from displaying a respective item in a set of items to displaying a next item in the set of items.

First off, IANAPL (I am not a patent lawyer).

I know, looking at the abstract isn't particularly helpful as it's horrible patent legal speak. All you really need to notice is the repeated use of the word "heuristics". This is a software patent. They're patenting the heuristic (READ: software) used to determine what a user means by multiple figured gesture on a touch screen. The claims in the patent just go on to clarify what heuristics they're covering.

To answer your second question, I'm not really sure. In any case, it's my hope that when the Supreme Court reviews the "machine-or-transformation" test with the In re Bilski case that this and other software patents will be invalidated.

The radio vendor Apple uses (Infineon) already licenses the patents in order to build their baseband chips. However, if you read the terms of the licenses, they aren't (and I can't remember the actual term) "follow-on" licenses. Meaning anyone that uses those chips also has to license the appropriate technology in order to use them. Apple and Nokia are playing the usual game. Apple wants too much for the "precious" multi-touch patents, and Nokia just wants to do what most companies do in the industry. Set up a cross-licensing agreement and be done with it.

... Or more likely they've been talking with Apple and RIM for a while now, and the negotiations broke down.

Quite thin? Every DLP TV I find listed is at least 10 inches thick, if not more. Check out the Mitsubishi models. While most are huge (and cheap for the size) they are anything but thin.

When will HTC be releasing the PassionC? I'm pretty happy with my current carrier (Verizon) which means I need a CDMA version of this phone...

While it's true than UMB died a horrible death, CDMA isn't going to die out any time soon. There are quite a few incremental upgrades in the future for CDMA 1x. The 3GPP2 standards body approved the 1x Advanced standard (4x improvement in voice calls in the same amount of used spectrum) and SVDO which will finally allow concurrent 1x Voice and 1xEVDO data calls. It's a fairly strong evolutionary path since it'll use much of the existing CDMA infrastructure making it a cheaper alternative to LTE or UMTS for current CDMA carriers. Many carriers will begin to roll out LTE at the end of 2010, but I really can't see wide scale adoption for several more years after that (Verizon thinks it'll have it all rolled out ~2013). So, for low end CDMA carriers, it's a lifeline. For others, it's a bridge to LTE while 3GPP works on the LTE voice call problem. AFAIK, there still isn't a standard for dealing with voice over LTE networks in the standard. One would think it would be some kind of VOIP (as LTE is an all IP network), but that's hard on carriers with all their "legacy" call handling equipment. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Hopelessly carrier dependent. If you think the standards themselves are alphabet soup, you should see the individual releases for each. What speeds you can get are very dependent upon what each carrier actually has rolled out (which is often not uniform). Phone hardware definitely ahead of what the carriers have rolled out in many cases.

I really do think cdmaOne(IS95) would have had wider adoption in the end if they'd employed a SIM mechanism. I'm not sure of the reason why they weren't included, but my unsubstantiated opinion is that it was carrier pressure back when CDMA was first being developed. The "If you include 'insert feature here' we won't buy." kind of thing.

Band space is a real freaking mess. It makes world/multi-mode phones needlessly more expensive due to complex antennae and RF hardware required to handle the large numbers of bands.

True. Not sure why it slipped my mind. D-AMPS was first implemented in 1990, while GSM didn't make it's debut until 1991. I don't think there are any carriers still using it. Last carrier in the US using it was US Cellular, and I think they switched to CDMA2000 at the beginning of this year (2009).

Sure thing. I was referring to ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) who has managed the GSM standard since they were transferred responsibility for the standard in 1989 (Phase 1 of the standard was published in 1990). They (along with many others) formed the 3GPP group that released the first UMTS standard in 1999 (commonly referred to as release '99).

There's a bunch of funny stories involved with the development of the UMTS standard. Most of which revolve around the fact that virtually no one outside of Qualcomm in the early 90s believed that CDMA could even work. Once it became apparent that TDMA systems were not technology of choice moving forward, ETSI had a problem. Qualcomm owns most of the IP for the air interface, and no one is fond of paying royalties. Comparing the CDMA to UMTS air interface standards will yield slight differences in many places for no other reason but to attempt to reduce the royalty rates. The one that comes to mind is reverse-link power control (the cell site telling the cell phone itself to transmit stronger or weaker). The only material difference is the reversal of the meaning of the power control bits.

Eris is cheap with a contract right now too. Saw it for $49 after a rebate at Best Buy recently.

Personally, I'll be waiting for whatever Verizon is going to call the HTC PassionC (Nexus is the HTC Passion, C for CDMA). That's assuming it actually gets there sometime in the near future.