If HTC is also now able at some point to make design an important part of its product development then they could truly become a leader. Design was an afterthought, though: practically all HTC phones I have seen impressed me with their feature list and pricing but I never bought one because I also buy with my eyes. Now people say the design and useability is great too, so I will take a serious look again when it is in the stores.

This list here has been compiled by people who don't want to miss e-mails during flights.
Check it out as well if you belong to these road/flight warriors.

While we can read daily on wireless technologies either about the 3G folks or 4G (WiMAX e.g.), fiber technologies are being deployed more and more, seemingly almost by stealth.

Reason is that fiber technology has become so cost competitive that only in cases where there is already copper deployed it might still make sense to upgrade with copper. Otherwise, in particualr for new installations it is more cost efficient to fully go to fiber. Not surprisingly, this math is true for greenfield places and similarly for developing countries. As the article in the International Herald Tribune shows, places like The Cayman Islands, Bangladesh go fiber all the way to residences. The bottleneck, traditionally on the access network side, is suddenly the backbone connection to the Internet. It is clear that with these access network upgrades the backbone networks will soon become challenged with entirely new traffic demands.
This will inevitably lead to upgrades there, too, and new fiber technologies in the 40Gbps range will have to be deployed to meet those requirements cost efficiently. Good things that are finally seeing the light of day, after being talked about and delayed now for 5 years...

Something must have happened at T-Mobile USA, the Deutsche Telecom US wireless carrier, recently. Shortly after announcing that they will upgrade their network to 3G they "recognized" that they own one of the largest Wifi networks with 7,000 hotspots (Starbucks, Hyatt Hotels and other public places).

While this is a trial in the Seattle area still, I would expect/hope that they roll out this service everywhere in the US.

Analysts think this is a service for under-30 youngsters only. I am not so sure. If I am travelling in the US I would like to have a service that I can do phone calls and at the same time also surf the Web at public places. I can imagine that not having to constantly log on (typing credit card details) but getting Wifi access just straight with your monthly plan is what consumers - and business travelers in particular - would like a lot. I would like it for sure. Why on earth it took them so long to figure that out though will remain an insider secret I guess.

I've been in Boston this week visiting the WiMAX World conference.

This is supposed to be the biggest such event in the world currently and Boston's World Trade Center was a good location for it - also size-wise not too big. Watching the scene and talking to many on the exhibition floor, I somehow had my own thoughts on the current state of (not WiMAX) the wireless 3G market and its proponents. The joke of the event was without a doubt a Siemens VP reminding the audience of the fact that UMTS has millions of users already and therefore WiMAX would have to arrange itself and co-exist with it. Now let's look at some facts that this gentlemen leaves open in his PR talks either through not knowing better or through fear of losing his job:

• UMTS is one of the most complex communication technologies I could think of. Based on ATM and a super complex signaling architecture it cost the big vendors hundreds of millions to develop and roll out the technology. Joke number one of course is the fact that Siemens e.g. has not even managed to develop a product on their own but is reselling NEC's equipment. With the Nokia merger it is to be expected that Nokia's product will be the joint offering.
• Now what can the UMTS handheld owner expect from this in terms of really usuable service? Nothing. I could not think of one single practical service that UMTS would be capable of supporting. This is the other big joke of course. With a GSM/GPRS phone I can make phone calls everywhere and download text e-mails. Surfing the web or download attachments is practically impossible to do. While UMTS is a bit faster in real world scenarios than GPRS it is still by far too slow to allow me fast Internet access or to download attachments in a practically useable amount of time. In short, all those billions that operators have spent for spectrum licenses and installing UMTS infrastructure do NOT add any really practical services to end users.
• So why are operators and most major vendors still hestitant to roll out WiMAX? It is entirely political. How do you want to explain that you have just sunk billions when now a technology (WiMAX) is available that together with GSM can do what UMTS is unable to deliver, for a fraction of the costs, and can do NOW? Full phone coverage and at the same time high-speed data access - so that finally people can really surf the Internet fast and download attachments on their mobile devices - is now possible with a GSM/WiMAX combo. Of course, operators and vendors cannot explain this, and that's the reason why the marketing/sales machines of operators spend their budgets on promoting UMTS handsets and "services" and hope to continue to fool more and more end users. They have been partly successful since many people are simply unable to look beyond the hype. But I think that we will also see more and more end users who will ask themself why they should pay more for a UMTS phone when it cannot add anything more or offer better practical services.
• So the VP from Siemens should indeed be scared since here too, just as in other markets, the customers will decide - and they will do just that at the end of the day, when they have a choice. That choice is coming with WiMAX and it is coming strong and fast...