Re: Why not support AT&T 3G Bands? (Peter please respond)
 

I'm basking in the glowing embers of what I KNEW putting a cellular radio into a tablet would get us.

Nokia should have just designed the damned thing with a slot for a radio so you can buy a radio for whatever carrier you needed. It'd be cheaper and modular. heh Way to be forward-thinking.

Re: Why not support AT&T 3G Bands? (Peter please respond)
 

Ha! Modular in mobile devices isn't cheaper.

Re: Why not support AT&T 3G Bands? (Peter please respond)
 

Ha! Built-in hardwired radio is SOOOO cheap, right? :P

Re: Why not support AT&T 3G Bands? (Peter please respond)
 

You're adding: certification costs, design costs, fabrication costs, all while increasing both bulk and decreasing ruggedness for a feature that only a very small number of your customers will ever use.

Yeah, no thanks.

Re: Why not support AT&T 3G Bands? (Peter please respond)
 

All the costs I could have saved if I bought that modular device without the radio if I chose NOT to have a cellular radio.. POSSIBLY opening up a sale in the future if I decide to spring a little more DO go the radio route. MUCH more affordable to more people.. and invites more of them to become a LARGER number of customers through the CHOICE of which radio to use.

As opposed to the current route of customers buying the first unit with only the supported bands it has.. then pissing off a bunch who'd rather get the later model designed for their own carrier (or worse, making people switch when they didn't want to).. making MULTIPLE models to support MULTIPLE carriers--which incurs allll the same costs mutiple times, warehousing MORE devices--many of which might not sell, all depending on which carriers people wanted to use with whichever model.

Oh yeah.. I can see how embedding a hardwired radio versus a modular design is so much cheaper for everyone involved. Sure. :rolleyes: So uh.. how's this going to end up satisfying the people complaining about AT&T 3G again.. .and cheaply? Small number customers indeed. :)

Re: Why not support AT&T 3G Bands? (Peter please respond)
 

T-mobile uses 1700 in conjunction with 2100 (one for upload, one for download)...they are not used separately like AT&T uses 850/1900.

Re: Why not support AT&T 3G Bands? (Peter please respond)
 

Yeah..and the radio-less internet tablets were just amazingly popular with the average joe before. You have it backwards..having a cellular radio makes it more appealing to the masses (single device that does everything), thus attracting larger numbers of customers...thus encouraging economy of scale and finally helping to keep costs down.

A "modular" N900 with removable/detachable radio would likely cost as much or more than the N900 we have now...without the radio. Modularity, as has been previously mentioned, adds enormous costs to development and manufacturing. Just having a removable battery adds to those costs in a non-trivial way (just ask Apple).

If there is enough demand, perhaps Nokia will release a true "tablet" follow-on, but given the relative commercial failure of the N800/N810 by comparison to their phones...I wouldn't hold my breath.

Re: Why not support AT&T 3G Bands? (Peter please respond)
 

@danramos: So, these modular radio chip/antenna/sim-holder combos will come from where? I haven't really seen anything like that available off-the-shelf. If you have seen something like that available from anywhere else, I'd be pretty interested in hearing about it to use with a couple embedded projects I've been following. :)

Re: Why not support AT&T 3G Bands? (Peter please respond)
 

I'm not sure that Nokia's phones have been the raging success with either the average joe or otherwise, the last time I checked. Can you check the numbers? I thought that Nokia lost marketshare in the period since the internet tablets were around--so it's probably not the just tablets' fault.

Near as I can tell, this whole new market that Nokia just about created and led (the Internet Tablet) is something for which they could have continued to pioneer--and it appears to be the trend you're seeing with several competitors that have popped up recently (Pandora, Archos 5 Internet Tablet, ODROID, etc.). Instead, they've relegated the N900 to another iPhone wannabe. That'll be a raging success in the "mass market" alright. :P Treat it like the openly expandable, portable general computing device that it should be and it'll do better than the iPhone wannabe that it seems poised to be.

I also don't buy the soldered battery argument. NOTHING excuses a soldered-in battery.. not size, not weight, not anything. Cell-phone batteries are thin enough and last well enough not to use that sorry excuse to charge people money to swap out a battery and make sure there's no third party market or competition.

Seems to me a company with Nokia's size and experience should have the resources and the intelligence to be able to make a small module that could be used across many devices to support a carrier.

I remember hanging around people in Silicon Valley, back when I lived in Santa Clara in the late 90's and early 2000's, that used to build their own cell phones. I'm not sure if these are useful for your interests:
http://www.opencircuits.com/Open_Mob...ts#GSM_modules

You might even want to take a look around the whole wiki for interesting project resources and information.

Re: Why not support AT&T 3G Bands? (Peter please respond)
 

I can vouch for that! Us folks in Kentucky may perhaps see 3G in 2011, but are lucky to have decent edge connections for a lot of areas, though I must admit it has gotten better in the past year.... A little bit.