Debunk: sleep easy, the iPhone's still a quad-band worldphone

May 19th, 2007, 00:40 Posted By: wraggster

There's been a lot of buzz these past couple days about the iPhone's FCC filing and what it says -- or rather, what it doesn't say -- about the handset's internals. The fear basically revolves around the fact that a lack of testing on the GSM 900 and 1800MHz bands indicates that it lacks those bands entirely, but we can assure the globetrotters out there jonesin' for an iPhone come next month that there'll be a full range of RF spectrum waiting for you. How do we know? Well, first of all, in the year 2007 (or 2005, for that matter) it's simply idiotic to release a wide-appeal phone with any fewer than four GSM bands. Quadband GSM chipsets have been commodity items for some time now and add virtually no expense to a handset's internals. Second of all, quadband phones never have their non-US bands mentioned in a filing, particularly in a test report.

Let's take a look at a released phone that we know to be quadband -- that is, a phone that supports GSM on the 850, 900, 1800, and 1900MHz bands, offering coverage pretty much anywhere in the world that a GSM tower exists. For our purposes, we'll pick on the RIM BlackBerry 8800. You're going to get a frightening peek into our daily FCC-lurking insanity here.

via engadget

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