NextG uses High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) technology, which in theory today is capable of shifting data at 1.8Mbps, and later a good deal more than that.
Although you’re not likely to get quite those theoretical maximum speeds, the performance is perfectly capable of turning mobile phones like the Treo 750 and the iMate JasJam into mobile broadband terminals, and high-speed modems for notebook computers.
Alas, Telstra has always regarded the carriage of mobile data on its networks as a complete luxury that should be restricted only to corporations, the very wealthy, or the financially foolhardy, and the rates they are charging for NextG data are, in our opinion, terrifying.
When it comes to the speed of emptying out bank accounts, no data network in the world comes even close to the plans Telstra offers at tinyurl.com/ywnpcj
For a two-year contract at $5 per month, for instance, that Web page suggests you can download 1Mb (megabit) of data, which would take your phone roughly one second to transfer. According to the Telstra salesman we consulted, someone in Telstra has missed the significance of capital letters in the world of data volumes, and they actually mean you can download 1MB (megabyte) of data, which would take a few seconds more.
After your free few seconds of data, you’d be subject to Telstra’s excess data fee, which on that plan is – gulp - $5 per megabyte.
On those rates, receiving and replying to a few HTML email messages, with those nice colour logos, could quickly chew up your allowance, given the fact that Telstra is also charging for uploaded traffic. We don’t want to think about the consequences of someone sending you a Word attachment, or some JPG images. According to our maths, on that plan, 1GB of data traffic would cost you $5000.
The Telstra salesman assured us that Web pages don’t use much data, but with statistics indicating the average Web page is about 60kB (kilobytes), once you browse more than 16 pages, you’ve exhausted your allowance. Even on higher-volume plans, which reduce the excess data fee to 25c per kB – those ones start at $59 per month with a free allowance of (chuckle) 200 megabytes (we’re taking the salesman at his word) - a gigabyte would cost $250.
For the first two months of a data contract – which is in addition, of course, to your telephone contract - Telstra is providing a free 50MB allowance to help users avoid an unpleasant shock, but after that, the meter will be ticking.
A Telstra spokesman says the average user wouldn’t consume 50MB a month, but we suspect that three months after they sign up, a lot of customers will discover that the world of fast data speeds is somewhat more expensive than they imagined.
If you’re not a corporate customer with a substantial discount, we therefore suggest you approach data transfers on NextG rates with the same caution you’d apply to playing with a loaded gun.
It’s a pity, because the Treo 750 would be a much more powerful tool for the average user if Telstra offered the sort of data plans that are commonplace overseas.
Unlike the previous generations of Treos we’ve so far seen in this country, the 750 uses the Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition operating system. Download a copy of Good Technology’s Mobile Messaging application – you should be able to get a bank loan to cover that – and you’d have access to on-the-road updating of email, calendar, contact and task information through Microsoft’s Direct Push email technology.
We suspect not many of our readers would contemplate doing that on Telstra’s rates, but even as a phone/PDA, there’s a lot to like about the Treo 750. There’s that well-designed keyboard that makes managing emails and SMS messages so much easier, and the designers have managed to integrate some of the clever bits of the old interface – including grouping messages into threads - into the Windows Mobile operating system.
Unlike the Palm-based Treos, which are beginning to show their age, the 750 meets current standards, with features like a 1.2megapixel camera with self-portrait mirror.
Unfortunately, users of previous generations of the Treo are likely to find the Windows operating system another stumbling block.
Bleeding Edge still uses the Treo 650, with its Palm interface, and we were quite ambivalent about the effort involved in converting our contacts etc via software conduits to Outlook.
Macintosh users would have to buy a copy of Missing Sync for Windows Mobile, for $US39.95.
The 750 is slightly smaller and lighter than the Treo 650, and it doesn’t have the protruding antenna. We’ll give you a fuller report on its performance as a phone, but if you’re planning to use it as a data terminal, we do hope somebody else is paying the bill.