When a specialist read this title, he could accuse me of dilettantism. He could say that more than one year 3G networks, namely commercial ones, are exploited in Japan, respectively, the phones, which are compatible with them, are 3G phones. But it’s not quite so.
Yes, WCDMA networks as well as all equipment designed for them must be compatible with each other. But there are several specifications, which appeared one by one. For example, R3 or 3. version is taken as a based European standard while in Japan an earlier version is used. As a result, we often confuse these standards.
Let’s turn to the phone LG K8000, which is made to use mainly in European WCDMA networks. In contrast to the other manufacturers, who only test their samples, LG is ready to produce this model in the shortest possible time. What is interesting about it? First of all it has those capabilities, which have been so actively discussed, but not showed.
So, the phone has a color TFT-display, which is capable to support up to 65000 colors. Now it’s not a miracle, because many GSM-phones are already equipped with them. Menu and extra features are not different from the phones of this class. The main peculiarity of the new model is an integrated camera. It gives an opportunity to make shots of a decent quality. They can be saved in a Photo album and then transmitted to PC. Date adapter or e-mail can be used for this purpose.
But this camera also can be used for video conferences, which become available due to high transfer data rates in WCDMA networks. Field tests, which were held in experimental 3G network (created by Ericsson) in Moscow, showed that this function works excellent. You can really see the caller; if he doesn’t move, you can view rather good pictures. This camera can rotate at the angle of 180 degrees, what allows to direct it to any side.
On the rather large screen the phone can display mpeg4 files, their quality is also acceptable. After watching several video clips you can understand that it’s not a phone, but a small TV. Besides, the phone can play back mp3 files and has much free memory space. The only shortcoming is that a backlighting of the internal screen isn’t switched off, when the closed phone plays back mp3 files, and it causes to an excessive power consumption.
If to say about other shortcomings, they are the following: short operating time, many ascetic features. However, we can say now that 3G means music, on-line video conferences and downloading of small video clips. We were not going to describe all phone features in this the frames of this article, we’d like to show only the most interesting ones. Unfortunately, other manufacturers haven’t showed yet such kinds of solutions but they still have time, don't they?
