Tech-No-Babble
Created | Updated Mar 26, 2002
Keep up to date with the progress of technology, here in the POST. This week we discover why the WAP could be out of date by 2001 and a review of a 20Gb Portable Hard Drive that makes use of Firewire.
G3 network to be tested on the Isle of Man
The island has been chosen as the world's first public test bench for the world's first third-generation - or Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) - cellular network.
The trial network is to be operated by BT's Isle of Man subsidiary, Manx Telecom and built by Mobisphere. This joint venture in Britain is between Japan's NEC and Germany's Siemens.
The phones will be able to download data at 384kbps - about 40 times faster than the 9.6kbps of today's models. This high speed connection will allow exchange of multi media information, such as video. Today's models, including the latest Wap gadgetry, are only fast enough for voice and simple text services.
BT is promising that when the network opens for public use in the first couple of months of next year it will allow customers to download sports highlights, play movie trailers, offer online seat booking as well as offer high bandwidth email, Net surfing and e-commerce services, including mobile banking. The network is due to be completed by the end of the year and should begin operations at the start of 2001. It will definitely be Europe's first UMTS network, although a service NEC is building for NTT DoCoMo in Japan might just launch beforehand - it is also due to begin operations in early 2001.
New 20Gb Portable Hard Drive.
A new 20Gb hard Drive is now available which uses the Mac Firewire port and is available for PC.
With computers moving into digital movies, transporting large amounts of data is becoming more important. The trusty old Zip drive has to make way for bigger media demands which means that the Zip is struggling to keep up.
Western Digital aims to solve this problem with it's new Firewire drive. Based on a technology that was primarily designed for the Apple Mac, the Firewire, or iEEE1394 as it is known in the industry, is a fast-speed data connection from an external source, such as a printer, video camera, or hard drive to the computer.
It has the added advantage of being able to transmit data up to speeds of 400Mbps compared to the paltry 4 to 8kbps a USB can muster at the moment. Apart from having an improved speed ratio over the USB connector, the Firewire has one other great advantage, connectivity. No driver installs or machine resets. just install a card and away you go.
When you plug in your 20Gb Western Digital hard drive, the icon pops up on the screen as just another drive, it's as simple as that. Because of the increased data transfer speeds available, the option of running programs from these drives also becomes possible.
But the Western Digital hard drive isn't the only reason for investing in a Firewire card. If you're a keen moviemaker and own a digital video camera, then the Firewire opens up a whole host of possibilities, for the majority of the new Sony cameras now carry the i-Link label, Sony's own branded iEEE1394 standard.
The only drawback at the moment is that PCs don't come shipped with the Firewire connection. Perhaps this will be something manufactures should look into as this means that when you download your files to the portable drive, you have to make sure that the PC to which you are transporting the data to, also has Firewire availability.
