Have a look at the picture on the left that I recently re-discovered. It's back from 2001 and shows the mobile devices I was using at the time. A Siemens S25 GSM mobile, no GPRS yet and a Palm III. Internet connectivity for email and some very very basic black and white web browsing over and infrared link and a circuit switched data connection (9.6 or 14.4 kbit/s) to an analog fixed line modem of an internet service provider. And that was only 10 years ago! Interesting to compare that to the gigahertz powered processors we have in mobile devices now, gigabytes of Flash RAM and display resolutions equaling that of desktop PCs of the time.
This might help to understand how people where once excited about 384 kbit/s wireless connections over the future UMTS system. Look at it also from this angle next time somebody says that UMTS was a mis-design before HSDPA was put on top of it.
Kindly explain, why is UMTS a “mis-design” before HSDPA was put on top it.
I had almost the same setup in late 2000, except I used the m100 Palm. My first mobile Internet experience was sending an email to work from London’s Edgware Road Tube station saying I was going to be late. Getting the s25 balanced over the IR port during dialup was just about doable with one hand. Dialup – how I don’t miss that!
The s25 was a nice GSM phone and the only one I know of that let you quickly record a short message that could be used to answer a call with a quick pre-recorded message using a side convenience button. The same button also worked to record both sides of a telephone conversation – handy when you didn’t have a pen handy.
I still have the cheap m100 and it still works, unlike the many expensive Palm devices I replaced it with that had screen reliability problems, which ultimately killed my affair with Palm. Manufacturers should never be complacent about reliability.
Dude, you still have those? Anyway, it’s sometimes nice to recall technology we’ve had before all this smartphone hype. At least now we have colored mobile phones with GPRS, Bluetooth and web connection. And we also have tablets in replacement for palm phones, which we can use to easily access the web, and can also lets you do your work when you’re in a relaxing environment, outside the confines of your office.