CES 2006: Samsung's HSDPA mobile
At last year’s CES by far the most impressive stand belonged to Samsung who delivered a huge array of innovative and exciting gadgets. It looks like it’ll be the same again this year and one of the devices we are most looking forward to seeing is the first ever phone with on board HSDPA.
If you are up to speed with your telecoms acronyms you’ll know that HSDPA or (High Speed Downlink Packet Access) is a variant of 3G which offers data download speeds way beyond the 384Kbps we have in the UK at the moment. Several companies are trialling HSDPA, but they have been using HSDPA cards for laptops. At CES Samsung will deliver the first HSDPA phone which it is apparently earmarked for Vodafone. It’ll offer download speeds of 1.6Mbps which should be more than enough for instant music downloading and quality video streaming. Ironically given that the US is normally pretty slow at new telecoms innovations, the first HSDPA system in the world was launched by Cingular last month. Americans can surf the web at speeds of up to 700Kbps via a HSDPA laptop card. More here.
