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Motorola Unleashes New High-End Phones

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Quadband

phone_guru101

Jul 27, 2004, 7:07 PM
why cant every other GSM phone maker follow moto's footsteps and just make every phone quad-band?
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bones boy

Jul 27, 2004, 7:10 PM
I've been asking the same question. Obviously it's not too difficult to add the 850 mhz capability to the GSM tri-band phones... Motorola, quality issues nonwithstanding, will continue to get all of my business. Now they have the first quad-band phone with EDGE - IMO they are leading the way in this type innovation.
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disturbed1

Jul 27, 2004, 7:11 PM
good question....money perhaps? It would seem to make life easier for both people who travel and those of us who stay at home.

Even if we are homebodies, most people eventually go somewhere where they need to call home, and if that's out of the U.S. then why not already have the capability built in?

Rich?
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Rich Brome

Jul 27, 2004, 9:57 PM
Two reasons:

1. The first reason is antennas. Practically all modern GSM phones - especially tri-band ones - technically have quad-band radios, it's just the antenna that's not quad, and the firmware is set to match the antenna.

It's really hard to design a single antenna that tunes equally well to all four bands. Nokia, with their huge R&D budget and small army of engineers, has yet to come up with a quad-band antenna that meets their internal standards on all four bands. Believe me, they're working on it, they just don't have it yet.

I don't know whether Motorola's standards are lower or their engineers are more talented, but regardless, they have designed an antenna that meets their reception standards. Most oth...
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ltxi

Aug 4, 2004, 10:19 PM
Now that's a rather interesting bit of theory -- easy to tune an antenna to 900mhz/1.8 & 1.9 gig, but tweaking it to 850mhz as well is hard?
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Rich Brome

Aug 5, 2004, 10:04 PM
That's what I hear. It's not so much that it's four bands, it's because the 850 and 900 bands are so close. I'm not an RF engineer, so I don't know much more than that.

When I asked a Nokia spokesperson why they don't make quad-band phones, that exactly what he told me.
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ltxi

Aug 6, 2004, 7:44 AM
He's BSing you. As far as the antenna goes, closer makes it easier. It's the investment in the electronics. I'm a die hard Nokia user, but the quad band Moto's work just fine.

-- Don
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Rich Brome

Aug 6, 2004, 8:49 AM
ltxi said:
He's BSing you. As far as the antenna goes, closer makes it easier. ...


Could you elaborate? Are you an RF engineer?

I really don't think it's BS. If you look at a tri-band internal antenna, it's really not much more than a three-pronged sheet of specially-shaped thin metal. The length of each of the three sections is what makes that part "tuned" to a particular band.

Each band is a range of frequencies. Each antenna part has to resonate across the whole range of its band, but not the other bands.

There aren't separate antennas for each band - all phones I've ever seen have only one "wire" for the whole antenna, regardless of the number of bands, and it's the antenna design that causes ...
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ltxi

Aug 6, 2004, 5:00 PM
I fly a desk these days, but my real work past life is EE/Comms. Antenna theory hasn't changed in, like, forever. You cut an antenna for a center freq it will work just fine on close enough either side. At around one gig, plus or minus 25 mhz is irrelevant.

As to "I've never seen a GSM 850/900/1900 phone" Nokia 6200 and the North American versions of most later Nokia phones exchange 900 for 850.

Not rocket science, trust me.

-- Don
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Glenn2004

Jul 28, 2004, 8:22 AM
For the same reason why we can't get some of the neat phones that people in Europe get. Money! How much money would U.S. cellphone companies lose if they actually came out with a phone that gave you everything you needed? They rely on us to buy phones every year. Yes--these GSM phones are nice if you have good coverage. I think companies like AT&T are taking their sweet time expanding their networks so we can continue to replace our phones for newer features. The networks are will never keep pace with cellphone technology.
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viper

Jul 28, 2004, 8:50 AM
quadband phones have been relatively expensive to make in the past and very few people actually need them.

You needed at least two power amplifiers and some pretty complex front end circuitry. I don't know of any vendors of RF integrated circuits that actually made quad band transceivers most were just tri-band, meaning a potentially more complicated and expensive RF front end.

As vendors see the demand they will integrate RFICs to supply quad band transceivers. The DSP (baseband is not a problem here). Ditto for the PA (power amplifier vendors) and then you'll see more supply of phones.

Mot may have cooperated with their own chip unit (now freescale) to come up with quadband support for a unique market fitting.

Part of quadban...
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