I carry my iPhone, but thanks to AT&T's lack of 3G service in many
medium-sized cities, I also carry my Verizon Wireless Android.
(by medium-sized city, I mean cities with populatin of less than
300,000)

Come to think of it, I can do everything on my Android alone,
but I still keep my iPhone... because... well... it's an iPhone!

But people don't give a damn about technology. When I travel, I want a reliable speedy connection - I don't care how I get it. All I know is that I hate paying $20/night for barely usable hotel WiFi.

Sure, WiFi offers just as good service, but at the end of the day, my WiMax downtown in Chicago gets me 6mbit whereas the $20 WiFi only gets 1mbit if I am lucky.

WiMax isn't going to get handset support if it's only on Sprint.

Country really needs all 4 carriers and they all need to use the same networking standard.

Although, I heard LTE has a much steeper falloff than 3G in throughput as you get away from the towers.

That's those darn laws of physics getting in the way of a good marketing campaign again. Same thing with 3G and WiMax in-building penetration.

Then why can't I get the Clear Wimax thing to work on my iPhone? Hmmm? People have to care a little bit about technology or they won't get anywhere. Not every hotel has crappy internet service. And some hotels have crappy wired internet. It has nothing to do with WiFi.

withouth admitting to anything... some Japanese love hotels
in Tokyo have really really fast free WiFi service in every room. a "friend"
tested it on a HP laptop and accessed speedtest.net(US server) and got
27mbps down (yes, twenty-seven mbps) and 11mbps up(eleven mbps),
consistently. That was IMPRESSIVE to say the least.

When will U.S. hotel catch up to that? come to think of it, I can't even get that kind of
speed at home, even if I'm paying $99 a month)

Is the talk here of the "next" iPhone referring to the AT&T or Verizon models?

Of course it's related. Our free market telecom infrastructure means the cable cos. and telcos have monopolies aided and abetted by the federal govt., whom they bought off with lobbyists.

So without competition, we pay more for inferior service.

Meanwhile, Japan, Europe and the rest of the world were way behind us, still using dialup when broadband started coming out in the US in the mid to late '90s. Japanese and other govts. were determined to catch up and they allowed unbundled services.

Didn't matter if the telephone company ran the broadband lines. They had to open it up to any ISP who wants to sell connectivity. So they're getting up to 100 Mbps connectivity for less than what we pay for 6 Mbps.

And guess what, they still have a competitive market and the telcos who ran the lines didn't go out of business.

I've seen >50mbit before in a US hotel. It all depends how many people are using it, and how much they have on the backhaul. Plus, speeds like that really are not limited to Asia - I get 50mbit at home too.

No - but WiFi is the technology of choice. In ten years it may be different.

In the hotel industry, Internet access is such a disgrace. Take a look at the Four Seasons - $650/night room with $29.95/night for Internet - that is just pathetic. And in times like that I am happy I have my adapter with me (or use Boingo when I can).

okay... what city/town do you live in? I want to move now...
where I live now, I can't even get more than 15mbps, no matter
how much I pay.... (well... I guess if I pay $210 per month
for three 15mbps connetions, then I may get 45mbps?)

Actually the real reason hotel internet is slow, be it WiFi or wired, is that the gateway at the hotel is programmed to rate limit each session to a slow rate such as 500Kbps or maybe less. It rarely has anything to do with the telecom infrastructure or ISP's.

But your point is valid in a general sense.

Upgrading your 3Gs to iPhone OS 4 will give you multitasking.

3GS is suppose to get multitasking. It's the 3G and the original iPhone which won't have multitasking.

Multitasking services are limited. Limitation might be tolerable if the hit to the battery life and responsiveness from running multiple tasks are minimal.

I know the limited info we have about the multitasking on the OS4.0 doesn't give us TOO much to go on, I've been thinking about it a bit. I mean, what IS "true" multi-tasking? Does it mean my left hand can do one thing WHILE my right hand does another?

When using a computer, I have many applications OPEN at the same time, and then for example in a browser I have anywhere from 10-50 TABS open, but I can only really READ one thing at a time, clicking from tab to tab.

I have my MAIL open, but I cannot read it WHILE I am reading something in the browser (unless of course I have it over to the side of the display or on my second screen OPEN) but it really isn't something that I can READ in PARALLEL to what I am reading or screening on the main screen. On something like an iphone or even an ipad for that matter I cannot imagine wanting to have multiple apps open on ONE SCREEN, the screen real estate just isn't there for that (more on that later)

When my MAIL app is OPEN on a laptop, I of course get an alert when new email comes in, that is useful. If I am working on a document in WORD I have that open, and I can cut and paste BETWEEN things like browser, email, terminal, etc. TO the WORD app when I need to so there is persistence of the copy/paste function.

Maybe I have pandora running on my laptop, maybe it is my slingplayer streaming CNN or CNBC or whatnot, and I can view this in a small window or click to it if I want to watch (this is a good case for the second screen which I often use to have the TV window resident on)

So, it would appear that if these items were in some form of stasis or monitored persistent state WHILE I was doing SOMETHING ELSE, then there wouldn't be any real need to have them doing MULTI whatever? Indeed, they are MONITORING some small things like network connectivity, or checking mail, or streaming music, but all this is supposedly available in the OS 4.0. Sure, there are something that a laptop and true multi-tasking CAN do like render a video conversion in PARALLEL to all the other things listed above, or crunch a 50MB excel file update or compress/decompress files with some compression utility, or rip a DVD/CD to some other format, etc. But, I don't ANY of these activities being something I want to or need to do on my phone.

So, with what I think we know of the OS4.0, that multiple applications will be "open" so not requiring a total relaunch and those applications will be able to both MONITOR services like network, baseband, AND PROVIDE services like AUDIO (it would be SWEET if the slingplayer version could at least continue to stream AUDIO similar to what apple has shown with pandora!!!! -CAN YOU HEAR ME SLINGMEDIA!) or inbound connections/pings/data such as CALLS over VOIP, SMS inbound, a CHAT response, EMAIL alert, etc.

It would seem that this is nearly enough of the multi-tasking that we require from such a device. I've played around with the OS4.0 beta, and I have several apps "open", I just click to one of them and BOOM it is there, need something from the browser CLICK BOOM and it is there. Playing a little game of texas hold'em, need to send an email, check on a FLIGHT, press BOOM I'm back over at flightview, refresh (I would have to refresh even if the browser was still open) BOOM there is the info, click BOOM I'm back at the game, etc.

This appears to be very similar to the WebOS MT implementation as well as the fact that on such a small screen one really doesn't want to SEE the additional apps info. Although, I will add that I am FAIRLY CERTAIN that we will soon see "widgets" of some sort that one can have floating around on the screen in the menu bar or sub-menu bar, that provide further information.