What exactly is a 3G phone?
With Apple's new 3G iPhone on the horizon you may be asking yourself, what exactly is a 3G phone? Well the answer is fairly simple, it's faster. That's really all you need to know to understand why the 3G iPhone is such a big deal, but the real nitty gritty details of the 3G phone goes a lot deeper, and takes more than a few words to explain.
For starters, 3G stands for third generation. This means that it is the third generation of mobile devices. The first generation was the original cell phone, which did little more than display time and make phone calls. This was amazing at the time, as it allowed you to call someone from anywhere, but looking back it's amazing how far we've come. The second generation of Cell Phone incorporated things like text messaging, calculators, calenders, games, and at it's pinnacle, data access. This data access could be web pages, games, songs, or many other types of data found online. The second generation of phones did this, but it did it slowly, with a lot of phones taking minutes to load web pages that would take seconds over wi-fi.
This is where the third generation comes in. While the actual numbers are very complicated, 3G phones offer much faster data transfer, as much as 14 Mbits a second. This easily rivals some computer download speeds, and surpasses 2G phones by a lot. It also means that things like making phone calls and sending text messages can become more complicated and better quality. Phone conversations can become crystal clear over a 3G connection, and you can send images and video easier via text message. All of this is due to increase data transfer efficiency based on the International telecommunication Union's standards. This means that the new iPhone will do everything the original iPhone promised to do at blazing speeds, something we can all appreciate. It is especially important for business people, who no longer need to look for wi-fi to get their email quickly. So there you have it, a basic rundown of what 3G means.
