By Jo Best, 2 December 2004 11:50
NEWS Consumer magazine Which? has advised Christmas shoppers to stay away from 3G.
Which? has told consumers that for the moment, the cost of buying a third-generation handset is too extravagant because of the limited nature of the 3G networks outside London and the UK's other major cities.
The magazine also said the handsets were oversized and recommended the UK public stay with their old-school handsets for a while yet.
The mobile operators paid £22bn for their 3G licences and have been hoping a spate of pre-Christmas launches will encourage mobile owners to upgrade to third-generation functionality. So far, however, it's been the operators' business offerings - 3G data cards - that have been flying off the shelves, and analysts are predicting theyll be the big star of the 3G portfolio.
At the moment, 1.2 million of the cards are in use - and analyst house IDC expects that number to grow to 5.7 million by the end of 2008.
Comments
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1. anonymous
I am glad and quite right too - The mobile networks have ignored the data users for a long time.
It's about time that the mobile networks listen to there customs.
2. Duncan Elliott
I'm not sure I would agree with the Which? report claiming that 3G handsets are "too extravagant" given their features. You can pick them up for £30 now at Argos and the like.
There are most certainly some chunky monsters (and there used to be more - it has got better) but there are also some very fine 3G phones available. For this reason, the LG 8110 and now the 8120 have been flying off our digital shelves (we sell them at http://www.2u.co.uk).
3 positioned themselves with phenomenally cheap call minutes in order to grab market share. They have achieved this, and along with this, the demand for smaller handsets to simply use these cheap calls has been high, hence the LG 8110 and the LG 8120 (and now the LG 8130). Over 90% of our sales are accounted for by these phones, so a study focusing on the other 'chunky' 3G handsets is commercially redundant.
3. Mark Savage
I have had a 3Pay 3G handset for several months now and the only complaint that I have is that I have no-one to VideoCall at the moment. As to the coverage, I live 35 miles outside London and have had no coverage problems as yet apart from the odd dead area that my standard Vodafone handset also had. I travel nationally and internationally and have no coverage complaints. The camera quality is good, the call quality, even in low signal areas, is excellent and the value for money is amazing (even with international calls from the UK). I have thrown my old Vodafone handset away and will definitely stay with 3.
4. Mark Savage
PS My handset is an NEC e228
5. anonymous
I have tried a couple of devices and found them to be very good. Video calling is a new mobile communications experience that will take time adjusting to; can the calls be recorded and used as evidence against crime and could this be the killer application? However, Multi Media Messaging is going nowhere because of relative costs (c.w. text) so what short term prospect is there for other enhanced services at similar rates.
6. Andy Woodfield
just got a Sony Ericsson V800 on Vodafone and I love it... and would recommend it for Christmas for anyone...
7. Johnny Marr
I'm the sort of wonk who JUST HAD to have a 3G handset as soon as they came out. I bought one of the Nec303 hansets last April, and it was such a piece of rubbish [you know the reasons - size of a breeze block/1 day battery life/looked like it had been designed in 1974 by a blacklisted Ukranian product designer who had taken to drink, and gone blind], that I ditched it within a month, and went back to Orange. That little 3G misadventure ended up costing me > £1000 all in. Ho Hum.
Point is, I am soooo wary of the performance of 3G handsets that even the virtually free calls won't tempt me back. Hutchinson should have waited until it had decent gear before launching. They're gonna have to work ten times as hard to overcome the horribly negative experience I had. Once bitten, twice shy...
The killer app for cellphones is voice, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. There are no 3G services worth having at the moment. So all the 3G evangelists promote their phones on cheap voice. Which could be done with 2G anyway.
8. Nathaniel Carter
I can't believe that it has taken Which so long to figure this out. They could have told me a year ago when I bought one. Since purchasing I have never had a good connection, it usually takes 3 tries before I can connect. Tried different phones and devices, I got so mad, I stopped using it over 4 months ago. I live in central London, so it cant be a bad area for coverage. As far as I am concerned I want my line rental back. They failed to provide a service to me and still want my money? Forget that! Interestingly, when you want to cancel your contract, they put you through to someone in Scotland instead of India. Maybe if they did that in the first place, my problems would be understood and solved by now.
9. Tim Bradley
I have an LG8120. It is an excellent piece of hardware and software. The coverage is as good as when I was with Orange. Very cheap deal on phone calls though was what sold it to me.
10. GM
Um...? How about cheap and works OK? I'm on 3 because it was very cheap - £0 for an LG8120 video-camera-phone handset and currently about a fiver a month for 500 minutes/mth! (6 month offer, of course, but nobody is going to beat it during the 12 month contract period). I don't care about online services, video calls or multimedia messages, I just want a cheap phone with reasonable battery life. (OK, I also use the camera which is not bad.) As far as coverage is concerned, 3 "falls back" to the O2 voice network if 3G is unavailable, so I have better coverage in rural Perthshire for voice calls than I had with Orange GSM. 3 seem to have some bandwidth problems in central Glasgow which means the service isn't always accessible even on full strength signal, but these are more glitches than serious problems. It's not perfect, but it's cheap, it works and I'm saving a lot at present compared to my previous service - all of which I would have thought would be important to "Which". I have touched with my bargepole and survived!
11. Pete Hughes
I also disagree with the Which? report ...
I'd like to have seen what handsets they based their assumptions on! I have an LGU8110, and whilst not perfect (lacks memory and a decent speaker!), it is far from being "bulky".
As for the 3 Network, yeah - had trouble with the signal, but most of my trouble has actually been down to the phone just locking up on occassion (about 4 times in 6 months). Plus you're locked in to the 3 network content, which is also slightly more expensive than its WAP counterpart for other networks.
However the range of services available is quite impressive (find me, find my nearest ..., 3-alerts, video clips (for sports, news, weather, music, etc.), and an e-mail account that is accessible from the handset :-)
My only gripe about the 3 network, is the LACK of COMPATIBILITY with other network services. No wonder MMS isn't taking off quite so quick as SMS did! The real "kick in the teeth" with this though was not finding out until I received an alert from 3 stating "You can now send/receive MMS messages with Vodaphone customers ..." (hello? didn't know I COULDN'T!!!).
12. royston
£30.00 nec e616 3pay works fine. ocasional services problems(slightly on edge of area coverage )but works on voice all the time.video works fine and text. cheap to use.cheap to buy. cheapest mobile setup i ever had.if it goes upwards and better i wont complain but up to now its briliant and i live in north wales.nowhere near london so i dont know what xich is on about. the handset is a little large but i lose these micro flip phones easy (they slip out of pockets etc) this one is just right.2 cameras built in the res is good and i get a light for the cam built into take pics in the dark. oh and a spare longlife battery. (jeez i sound like a salesman) but i have to admit this is one of the best phones i ever had. which mag is being paid to undermine vodaphones 3g takeup by the sounds of it(joke)its the price of the phone that was the reason i bought it.just over £30.00 from high street store,briliant
13. Terence Chisholm
3G coverage at the moment in central London is awful (with calls being disconnected as you turn the corner and taking 3-4 times ringing through to get a connection).
The support for any technical issues (like receiving notification of new voice mails - which can take upto a day at times) is entirely unacceptable... and has lost me several important clients.
The interface must have been designed by anarchists. Having what seems to me to be fatally flawed logic, the options are scattered all over the place using abbrevations for things that no one (on the support line) actually knows what they stand for or do. Don't believe me? Just phone them and tell them you have a NEC e616 and ask them what a APN stands for. Uuuugggghhh... will be the answer.
Because there is no documentation on the handset on NEC's site, and no further documentation on three.co.uk, you will be left guessing what settings change what.
When phoning for support over 4 times on the same issue, I found out that although the support calls are dealt with in India, they have no 3G network coverage there, which could explain why they often take guesses on what could be the trouble instead of being able to walk through it properly.
The service - awful... if not criminal. In fact, every essential service tested on my 3 phone (voice calls, voice mail notification on my NEC e616) was so much hassle with lost messages and delays...
I have lost clients. Business. Money. All thanks to 3. Hurrah! Sure the video cameras work... but who cares, if you can't chat to someone on your phone, then what's the point?
14. n1 geeza
I respect Which? a lot, but I'm not sure I agree with all their comments.
I've noticed a lot of negative press recently with regards to 3G and whilst I agree there may be handsets and providers to avoid, I've just been upgraded by Vodafone to the Sony Ericsson V800 3G phone - from my rather clunky (but masterful) P900, who now lives in the drawer awaiting a call up to the 1st team squad in the event of any injuries, theft or damage). The result, I now have a phone that is light, fast, stylish, can handle large memory cards (2-3 albums worth of mp3s and over 200 pictures on a newly acquired 512MB Sony memory stick) plus a significantly cheaper monthly contract rate offering more minutes, sms etc than my old contract.
In short, I'm loving it!
I'd also like to add that I have travelled out of London and it worked fine, including mainland Europe. I was in three cities in the Netherlands last weekend and as long as I stayed on the Vodafone GPRS network, I was rarely without a signal. It may not be entirely accurate, but I have also been told that when GPRS is not available, the phone reverts to the 'old' service, which from the end user perspect seems fine to me.
15. Stephen B Streater
There's little point in buying an elaborate 3G phone if it can't run a wide range of software, so I'm waiting for the Symbian 3G phones to come out.
In the mean time, mobile video editing is the ideal application for 3G data cards, as you can see from this Orange video: http://www.forbidden.co.uk/demos/corporate/videos/orange/partner-auto/
16. Jackie Ryder
I had an LG 8120 on 3pay in January. I have since had it replaced twice and then this week got sent a brand new LG 8138 as way of an apology, for the third phone going wrong. The network is good for coverage and price plan, but the phones are not so good!!!