baz.com - Brett Thomas' Blog

As a long-suffering Treo user - I believe I've owned every GSM non-WinCE-based Treo - I of course was very interested in the new iPhone. One of the major current criticisms of the iPhone is that it isn't "3G", or "third generation" - that is, it uses AT&T's "EDGE" network (with speeds of about 100kbs), rather than the new HSDPA network, which theoretically does up to 7Mbps. Many people have been mystified by this decision, but the reason is obvious, to me - AT&T in no way could've supported millions of new HSDPA users in the timeframe needed for the iPhone. In fact, I have an HSDPA "modem" (technically a terminal adapter) for my laptop, and I even now get far less than 7Mbps or even the 3Mbps that it's "supposed" to run. It's faster than EDGE, for sure, but even with the capacity they have now, it's definitely slower than most people's home DSL or cable connections.

I of course, immediately ran out and got an iPhone as soon as they were available, regardless of this criticism. Now, my Treo only did EDGE, and I browsed on it like crazy. All the time. I mostly stuck to text-based web pages, not because of network speeds, but because the Treo's web browser was unusable on anything at all complicated. Thankfully, though, with the rise of blogs and Google Reader, it's pretty easy to find interesting stuff to read that's mostly text-based, and I wrote some custom filters on my web server to trim out the complex stuff in web pages to make them visible.

So, it seemed obvious to me that the iPhone had to be much better at this activity than the Treo - the mobile network was the same, but the iPhone would be able use WiFi when at home or work or in many other places. Unfortunately, one of those places without it happened to be where I went to lunch on Friday with my friend Gene Hoffman, who has also owned every non-Windows-GSM Treo, and who also bought an iPhone. I'd brought my laptop bag with me, as I was leaving work for the afternoon, afterwards. As we were sitting browsing on our phones and bemoaning the slowness of EDGE (cnn.com, for example, takes a good 30 seconds or more to load), I had a sudden idea: I could use my HSDPA card in my laptop, and share the connection using the laptop's WiFi! I set it up quickly, and we were soon browsing the web on our now 3G iPhones!

This, of course, raises the obvious question, "If you're going to turn on your laptop to use your HSDPA connection, why don't you just...use your laptop?"

There are several good reasons why this is a better solution:

1. This allows the connection to be shared. If you have two (or more!) iPhones you're using at the same time, this makes everyone faster.
2. My laptop (a 17" MacBook Pro) has terrible battery life, but it's mostly because of the giant screen. If you're not actually using the laptop, you can turn off the screen and at least double the connection life to something like four hours.
3. The iPhone is the only mobile device I've had that's usable in direct sunlight. You can easily read the screen even outside on a bright, sunny day. The same is not true of the MacBook - even if you crank the screen brightness to maximum, which, as noted above, gives you the shortest possible batter life (something less than two hours).

So, anyway, there you go: 3G iPhone! I'd note of course, that it's probably not worth purchasing a MacBook Pro and an HSDPA card and separate subscription just to get this. But, if you already have them...