It's already been done in 2007 by Nokia and Siemens, and is part of the 3GPP standard. 3GPP TR 23.806 (for voice, but works for data too). Repeat after me all you Americans: International standards are better than propriatary ones.

Oh my god, ... it's full of triangles!

Trying not to Troll, I do have 10+ years experience in designing radio networks and mobile phones. All the early phones the whip antennas were encased in plastic. That was why they were black and not silver. It is a very thin nonconductive layer. Not a lot, but all you need to make it work.

Design: Only an ignorant fool would put an external, metal antenna on a phone. Not only does nobody do this, nobody has ever done this in the history of mobile phones. Even the whip antennas of the 80's were coated in plastic for the very reason that a direct connection changes the electrical length of the antenna (and hence the frequencies that it can transmit and receive. When you are part of the antenna you radiate too.
Cannot admit: iPhone4 irradiates you when you hold it wrong. It may appear that the iPhone4 gives you cancer.

Manufacturing: There may be a manufacturing component to it as well. We know they were rushed out the door without even time for the touchscreen bonding glue to dry. Clearly the Foxconn QA was not followed. If an engineer leaves a thumbprint on an internal antenna it detunes it. Imagine what a rushed assembly with leaky glue would do to the tuning characteristics.
Cannot admit: Apply don't pay their manufacturers enough and circumvent their own QA guidelines to rush product to market. They may appear like greedy bastards.

AT&T: The drop problem is also in a small, small part down to AT&T's 3G network topology. Nowhere near as bad as the old iPhone problem of congesting the signalling channels, this is simply due to the fact that 3G signals are way more sensitive to received signal strength. When you hold it the wrong way not only does the handset not heat the base station well (showing fewer bars on the phone) but it is the network that cannot hear the iPhone that causes the call drops as your entire hand and arm are radiating instead of the antenna. When you broadly detune the antenna with your hand the lower powered 3G signal is simply too feint and distorted to be heard by the base station. It does explain why the locations where the issues appear are random and seemingly not related in all cases to the downlink signal strength shown on the handset. RF signals are like that.
Cannot admit: The issue clearly isn't all to do with AT&T and they blamed them the last time with the 3GS.

There are three sets of tests you need to run at each location, or along each drive route. That means three runs along the same route, or three cards. All can be scripted in dos or Linux. From simplest to most complex they are:

1) Ping Test. A simple ping to the nearest visible IP address, usually the GGSN, will give you the round trip time for a session in progress. You are looking for the variability. A simple ping -t command for a few minutes and plot the results in excel. You can vary the packet size, but the two tests below give a more accurate test for throughput. Protip: if you want to measure radio channel activation time too then you need to know a few network parameters, specifically the radio TBF timers. You would only do one ping at an interval greater than the timer so that each new ping needs a new radio resource allocation request. The round trip times for the first ping will always be longer, and recording variability in the allocation requests is useful if you are the network, not so much for users.

2) TCP Test. Use an FTP session download a file of known size to get the actual time taken. Then you need to upload that file back to a separate directory and compare the two (or just see if it opens). You actually have to do the math to get the bits per second, neither the windows or Linux native clients show it correctly. bps = bytes_recieved * 8 / seconds. Protip: you need to test several file sizes to get an accurate picture. I'd suggest one run would up/download several 300k and 1Mb files and one 10Mb file. To complete the test in the field you do need to check the upload is successful using a terminal session, but remember not to have the session open using the test equipment as it will bias the test.

3) UDP Test. For assessing the actual performance of the radio network itself the only test that has any relevance is a unidirectional UDP stream because the radio resources are allocated unidirectionally and have asymmetric speeds. TCP is not a test of the radio network itself as the uplink channel causes throttling on the downlink due to the slower uplink. You need a utility that sends UDP packets of a certain size, and a utility to receive them. Ideally the packets have sequentially numbered content because what you are looking for is out-of-sequence delivery. You measure the bandwidth by sending a known number of packets of a known size and simply subtract the timestamps from the client to get the duration. This has to be tested separately on the uplink and the downlink. To instigate the downlink stream you again need a remote session, ideally not using the test equipment.

I could see how this would work if the PDA's screen was used as a touchpad when docked to the laptop (although the laptop would be a bit useless on its own without the phone. Perhaps as a secondary display it would be OK?

but aparently not a "perfect" solution either...

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/06/full-content-rss-fee.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+(Boing+Boing)

Sadly this means the end of the remaining few Window Mobile OEM. What is the incentive to produce a product that is so similar to what HTC can pump out?

Microsoft has always pushed a direct relationship between manufacturers and Operaters and continue to do so with the Windows Phone Series. Unfortunately this is detrimental to pretty much everyone. The usual value chain in the mobile phone industry is that an ODM manufactures the handset and does software integration. An OEM picks up the handset and adds branding, logistics, operator approval, distribution partners and possibly some novel software. The OEM then sells to retail or operators. They also take the monatary risk on forward ordering from the ODM and smooth out peaks and troughs in the device supply to simplify things for the ODM. With a unified UI and hardware specs what incentive is there for the OEM?

When you don't have an OEM in the middle then device approvals take much longer, and bugs slip through. HTC's Nexus One should never have gone to market in such a poor state. 3G is still not working properly. An OEM in the loop would have tested the device on AT&T and T-Mobile before launch. Google don't have the necessary experience to do that, HTC still don't (although after killing off their OEM partners two years ago they SHOULD have by now.

What worries me most is that Microsoft is closing the door on the whole OEM model. This means Operators become more wary of new phones, the money isn't forward loaded into the ODM from distributors to develop the phones in the first place. Who will be paying the NRE on a new handset? Microsoft, the operators, or the ODM? Without any incentive for the OEM to produce a differntated product the whole cycle will fail.

The amount of dead space on the home screen is really, really bad. Forcing any text on the home screen to be small is a disaster and will lead to eyestrain for many users. The on screen keyboard also look far too high up the device leading to even more black, dead space under the keyboard. Thanks for covering up well over half of my application whenever a keyboard is on screen! Didn't really need to use a full screen anyway.

Actually that would be if my app actually ran on this pig. I have to rewrite it all, and all my propriatary corporate integration apps, database backends and productivity apps. Oh and I cannot customise my own theme even? It's turning into a worse lock in than the iPhone.

If I have to rewrite eveny app I use then I may as well port it to Android!

Look at HTC who make 50% Windows Mobile and Android. Across both platforms they have their own (pretty good) UI. Now they cannot use their UI on Windows Pone 7. THAT will tip them over to Android in a big way, and the $15 windows tax.

I bought GT4 specifically for the Nurbergring, and was very disappointed that GT5 preview didn’t include it. The upgraded graphics are OK, but the difference isn’t that great when you are into the action. Would still wait for GT5 just so I can drive the updated vehicles on the Nurbergring. Not losing sleep over the delay.

Most modern ARM/Snapdragon based devices can run either WinMo, Android or Linux. HTC as a vendor has been making the exact same hardware run with either OS for several years and only switched on Android when it was ready. They even could have dual booted their Shift device between real Windows and Windows Mobile except for pedantic licencing restrictions. I'm not sure a third pary software VM is really the best way of implementing this though, especially with sharred data storage and databases (contacts, etc) between the two. you also have the problem of hard resetting the device (and the data store) and upgrades to one or both of the OS'es.

there are IMEI blacklists. If your phone is stolen in the UK you can (theoretically) put it on a blacklist so that it will not work on any of the networks here. Good luck with that level of cooperation in the USA by the way.

Guess all the stolen UK phones end up in India.

Wireless Internet Providers are just that, ISP's. They should have the same level of monitoring and control of the sites I surf and the applications I run as a terrestrial ISP, ie NONE. I can see that they would welcome this move, it helps them disguise the fact that they have become dumb bitpipes and are losing money on value added services.

In the corporate space however there are device management solutions available for Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Symbian that have seldom been rolled out at carrier level. These can lock down devices so that malware cannot be installed, and unauthorized applications removed. I cannot see that working as a consumer proposition, it really doesn't work well at the corporate level either. importantly these solutions are all at the IP layer (dumb bitpipe) and don't care how the device connects to the management server. ActiveSync, WiFi, cellular connection (and yes, via SMS too) will all trigger a wiped device or an app uninstall.

Nothing to do with telcos. Move along.

It's asking me to login. I don't have a login to Google "services". How do I see the info that Google has on my browsing history without logging in?