HSDPA Handsets

While digging for something else I'll blog about shortly, I ran across an announcement of the N902iX, an NTT DoCoMo FOMA 3G/HSDPA handset. What does that mean to you? If your 3G cell phone network is built out for it, and increasing numbers of them are, you can, in theory, get up to 3.6 Mbps to your cell phone, compared to the nominal 384kbps of straight WCDMA. Mostly this has been available as PCMCIA cards for laptops; the claim is that this is the first true HSDPA handset.

Speaking of which, apparently a good fraction of the FOMA handsets now available include triband GSM. My N900iG, bought in January 2005, was the first such handset (and suitably buggy and power-hungry), but now DoCoMo is saying that within two years they will require all of the FOMA handsets to support GSM. The announcement I saw didn't say which frequencies will be mandated, but I think the ones in use are still proliferating worldwide...