It is hard to believe that the main concern about 3G in the IPhone is battery drain.

This is probably the most advanced personal devide in the decade. It does not look like a big challenge after that to avoid battery drain if they had decided to add 3G chipsets.

3G is not a major breakthrough today, and most cellphone makers have overcome the technical difficulties..

I'm not big on the idea of a phone you have to charge every night, or that uses up half its battery life on data services in a 15 minute period. But to some people that isn't a big deal.

The more important question to me for AT&T is whether they will have 3G service available anywhere in the U.S. for people to use. Right now they don't. You have to drill down VERY far in their "city-level" coverage maps to find 3G service, if it's available at all. And in most cities in the U.S. it isn't. The maps haven't changed a bit in the past year which does not bode well to me.

@MACPollo: given all its functionality, the power demands of the iPhone are big. They save on every single watt and 3G radios are still big power hogs except for some cases, like the one linked in the article. When a company designs a product they usually set goals and try to achieve them. With the iPhone, Apple aimed at getting X hours of battery life at Y dollars price point and, looking at the available components, they settled on EDGE.

Yay! And only 5 years after the rest of the industry. Dont get me wrong...its still a revolution in mobile technology. I heard you can control it by dragging your fingers over the screen. And the icons are reeeeal pretty.

Look at the success of iPhone today and you would think it's would have been stupid to waste one round of income by putting 3G in the first generation of iPHone

GGore is right, as the reported power problems with 3G chipsets have only been half the problem.

In order to have 3G support one also needs a 3G network, and AT&T has been struggling to roll it out nationwide. Only 38 states have 3G access, and even there it's limited to a handful of cities.

See: [www.iSights.org]

@jesusdiaz: The AnandTech comparison of 3G on the Blackjack vs. EDGE on the iPhone provides some excellent data to back this up. The difference in energy consumption is quite pronounced.
[www.anandtech.com]

@MACPollo:

That isnt the main concern with 3g, the main concern with 3g and the iPhone, is the same as every concern they have with any of their products.

Make you pay for an upgrade, EVERY YEAR....

@ggore:
ggore, you are looking at old maps. most major US cities have 3G coverage by AT&T, and the east and west coasts are covered. As a matter of fact, they are done with first tier cities, and have moved on to second tier cities, like Birmingham AL and Laredo TX.

oh yeah, but you are right that outside of the cities, there is no coverage.

I was looking at the current maps when I posted this morning. I live in Oklahoma, and the ONLY city where 3G is available here is in Tulsa. No 3G coverage ANYWHERE else in the state! I guess the capital, Oklahoma City, is a 3rd tier town.

no, it's second tier, and it's coming.

How many 3G phones out there do not have a replaceable battery unit? When the iPhone supports 3G, it seems that Jobs is going to have to give in a bit on his design belief that there should be no compartment for battery replacement on small devices. This is not only necessary because he will be lucky to get the battery to last 48 hours, but also because new batteries will be required more often with all of the charging that users will need.

That said, are iPhone users really upset with the current EDGE capabilities? Since there is WiFi available on the device, I would think the EDGE battery life would be a perfect back-up, especially given the better battery life. I do not own an iPhone, but I would think the current compromise is ideal.

Should I wait to buy for some battery-eating 3G fanciness or just bite the bullet?

Hm.

I don't have Wi-Fi at work and get really crappy Edge speeds inside my building that doing any kind of surfing on it is unbearable (i.e reading feeds in the crapper). However when I went to IL for Thanksgiving weekend the Edge speeds there approached 200kbs and seemed very speedy and usable. It saved me from extreme boredom...

God Jobs said the same thing when he was in England launching the iPhone.

Past 3G chipsets sucked a lot of power. Just like the current WiFi chipsets sucked a lot of power. If you don't believe me just turn on you WiFi and see how much use you get from your iPhone surfing the net.

good, i phone will be just in time for the new 4g with verison lol

idiots...

i know the news about Apple is not from Steve Job's mouth...

the problem with 3g on the iphone will be network bandwidth. can the 3g network support rich media experiences for all the simultaneous users -- at a reasonable price point?

is at&t going to allow people to be flinging unlimited video files, photos, and audio into their 3g network for $20/month?

@monty:
wifi would be a great primary network if it were supported better on the iphone. the iphone wifi implementation is still missing critical features like 802.1x authentication used by many businesses and universities.

it better be thin as the iphone touch or have GPS or something else in addition to it being 3g. If it looks the xact same and everything is the same except it has 3G added, that is no where near enough to get me to drop another 400 bucks.

I find I get decent battery life giving how much more crap I do on my iPhone as opposed to any of my prior phones.

I don't have any issues with EDGE anywhere I have traveled, and I have found that WiFi drains more battery than my EDGE connection does.

I would love to see a number of improvements to the iPhone before 3G comes to life in its oh so delicious form. Removable battery would be one of those things. Another would be some fixes to the interface system in places (small tweaks really). Yet another would be allowing non iTMS songs to be turned into ring-tones or Garageband tracks be turned into ring-tones.

Full debug mode would be nice as well, for all those times Safari dies from crappy sites with too much JavaScript and such. The web debug is nice for things I design myself, but for things like checking my MySpace messages (sadly too many people communicate through MySpace as a primary method) and media heavy sites Safari on the iPhone seems to crash a lot.

@MacAddict21 and all the others talking about the iPhone in the USA:

The iPhone has now made it to the european market (or will be there before christmas, same idea) which as far as my experience goes, actually has good 3G coverage now (bigger population density helps) and would appreciate or expect 3G (even HSDPA and/or HSUPA) to come as standard in a 400€ device (and yes, major price shaftage, thanks steve) with a carrier lock-in (no one pays that much for a locked cellphone here). Also, this market hasn't bought the devices yet, so the rebuying thing is not an issue as it would be for the kind of person commenting on the Giz.

Another story (forgot where I read it) reported a Euro carrier guy saying a 3G iPhone would be available in May '08. Given that, I would assume that US intro would come sooner, if only to allow Apple to test the product closer to home, where fixes are easier.

I played with an iPhone in my local Apple store. With WiFi turned off, web surfing was just too slow (not to mention that the iPhone rebooted on me while loading a page with lots of photos). With WiFi on, it was great.

I'm waiting for a 3G iPhone.

I'm waiting for a battery door. Stupid apple

dammit, just as i was lining up a landing, forced into another holding pattern....

@ggore:

"I live in Oklahoma"

there's your first problem.

I hope when Apple is talking about a 3G IPhone it means 3.5G (HSDPA) compliant phones or is that just too revolutionary for an American phone manufacturor.

Anyway that part still confuses me, the rest of the planet doesnt even know what EDGE is (my network has limited support on it) and yet Apple releases a phone which can only connect with this EDGE story.