cell phones for multiple countries

[xxThe_Lebowskixx]

sim card is the way to go

[ElliotR]

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3G was created in Europe????? Ummm, no. Your "interesting" comparison seems to have left you sadly misinformed.

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Where do you claim it was invented then?

Try this and browse down to the entry 1991-1995.

1991 - 1995 two CEC funded research projects called Code Division Testbed (CODIT) and Advanced Time Division Multiple Access (ATDMA) were carried out by the major European telecom manufacturers and network operators. The CODIT and ATDMA projects investigated the suitability of wideband Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) and Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) based radio access technology for 3G systems. This work was later continued in the FRAMES (Future Radio Wideband Multiple Access System) project and became the basis of the further ETSI UMTS work until decisions were taken in 1998.

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Dude, please. 3G WCDMA was first developed in Japan and was first deployed in Japan by NTTDoCoMo. They were so anxious to do it that they couldn't even wait for it to be standardized. As for FRAMES, although one of the FRAMES outputs was indeed the WCDMA RAN scheme evaluated by concept group alpha, WCDMA as eventually standardized in 3GPP bears little relation to that output. A lot of what the Europeans screwed up in FRAMES had to be fixed by the Japanese and the Americans.

And indeed nothing in your quote from umtsworld contradicts this. The quote refers to "decisions" taken in 1998 -- an obvious reference to the decision at SMG 24bis in Paris to *proceed* with WCDMA for UTRAN. As everyone in the industry knows, the UMTS standard was not officially issued until almost two years later in December 1999 (Release '99). As everyone in the industry also knows, Release 99 was not even ready for prime time and needed an enormous number of debugging change requests.

I could go on and on, but I believe I've made the point.

[XXXNoahXXX]

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/devices...l.jsp?navId=H0,C201,P463

BlackBerry 8830 World Edition

[ElliotR]

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http://na.blackberry.com/eng/devices...l.jsp?navId=H0,C201,P463

BlackBerry 8830 World Edition





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ding ding ding!

That's my current phone and its fabulous. Great coverage in Europe and the US. I hear that you shouldn't expect it to work in Korea and Japan, though.

[Ray Zee]

what i do is get a costco or similar phone card from a major telephone company. then you can make long distant calls to the u.s. for cheap and get thru as you call the u.s. 800 number and then they put you thru. if someone wants to reach you they can leave a message on your u.s. phone and/or email.

you can also then buy phone cards for each country for inter calls.