Rich Brome of PhoneScoop writes in with some comments about the color Hiptop and Verizon’s new high-speed 1xEV-DO cellular network:
The color Hiptop will have a 65,000 TFT display. The Danger people told me at CTIA they have (had) various prototypes will all kinds of displays, but they have settled on the high-end TFT they were showing at CTIA, which I thought looked pretty good. Not the brightest, but very clear, colorful, and easy to read in most lighting.
The 1xEV-DO network set up at CTIA was a temporary one, and with so many temporary 3G networks of all types set up for demos for the show, the whole city was one big interference nightmare. There were just too many companies trying to put up extra temporary antennas on the roof, etc. – so that THEIR demo worked, other demos be damned. Everyone had cell phone problems the whole time (ironic, but it happens every time). There were many outages.
So I’m not at all surprised that the speed of the 1xEV-DO network didn’t impress. In a real installation, the network would be optimized and interference issues would be worked out through months of testing and tweaking – something that was not possible just for CTIA. In Verizon’s long-running tests in San Diego and Washington, the speed has been quite impressive.
