Differences Between 3g and 4g Mobile Phone Handsets

If you take a look at the mobile market in any kind of detail you will realise that there is not a single unifying networking technology in play. Telecoms firms have been evolving the infrastructure of mobile networks over a period of decades and at the moment the de facto standard is considered to be 3G, or third generation. Despite this there are still many mobile phones which still stick to the slower 2G networks and their associated standards such as EDGE. Although 3G is still not ubiquitous, it is coming to the end of its lifecycle and is destined to be replaced by the handily named 4G, although like its predecessors the fourth generation networking technology is not a unified standard but for the time being consists of many competing technologies.

Because 4G technology is not standardised there are only a few handsets which actually take advantage of 4G networking and even then these will not be compatible with every 4G network, so they must rely on backwards compatibility to remain relevant and widely usable. Under the 4G umbrella there is LTE, which is technically a superfast variant of 3G that is destined to be labelled as 4G because it offers considerably faster download speeds than current networking technology. There is also WiMAX, which is a 4G technology already in use in the US that offers wide area coverage in an expansion of the Wi-Fi technology that many people use on their home broadband connections. The status of WiMAX and LTE as 4G technologies are debated endlessly, as true 4G standards are not expected to emerge for at least a year and as such the handsets which take advantage of them are still beyond the horizon for most users.

Taiwanese firm HTC launched what is being claimed to be the world`s first 4G handset in 2010. The HTC Evo was made available in the US on the Sprint network, offering compatibility with WiMAX networks which have been set up in a number of US cities for high speed connectivity. The phone is typically forward thinking, with a 4.3 inch screen that dwarfs most of its rivals and a speedy 1GHz processor under the skin. It runs the Android operating system and has the ability to shoot high definition video clips using its rear facing eight megapixel digital camera. This makes it an appealing high end smartphone that definitely shows what a 4G mobile should be able to offer.

The current king of the 3G handsets is the iPhone 4. Launched in June 2010 it quickly became the fastest selling Apple handset of all time and despite some concerns over its antenna performance it has continued to remain a strong contender at the top end of the market. The iPhone 4 has a 3.5 inch touchscreen display that may be much smaller than that of the Evo, but it has a significantly higher native resolution of 960x640. This means onscreen images and text look much sharper and it is currently unmatched in the mobile market in this respect. It also has a camera capable of HD video capture and its FaceTime video calling capabilities are already making people use their mobile phones in a different way. It is likely that the next generation iPhone will offer 4G connectivity.