A Reuters report quotes a Nokia honcho stating that a 3G dongle is upcoming from the boys with the N in their name:
Nokia will start to ship its first Internet stick in early 2009, aiming to benefit from its know-how and experience in developing 3G technologies, Tapio Markki, vice president for hardware platform components at Nokia, told Reuters.
When I initially heard the story, I wondered why Nokia would do this. After all, their phones have served me extremely well in tethered mode (power supplied via a Proporta USB cable) – many if not most of the articles on this page were written on the go using this configuration.
So far so good…but this leaves carriers standing in the rain. In Austria, carriers aggressively promote so-called “data cards” – these are SIM cards offering data only (calling is either disabled or costs like 20 cents/minute depending on company). While the cards work perfectly well in phones most of the time, the companies would prefer customers purchasing two SIM cards for a variety of reasons not quite clear to me.
Nevertheless: the market is there. So – why not use it?
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