Anyone who’s laying down good dough for a new smartphone knows that finding one that fits all of your needs can be a huge pain in the rumper.
The right combination of desired LCD size, RAM, ROM, battery and style is the easy part. Matching that with the right radio frequencies can be the tough part. Especially for Americans, who are locked out of the 900Mhz bands because of ancient home wireless phones and don’t have a fully viable 2100Mhz band network available to them.
LTE and 4G are even more of a mess, with the frequencies all over the place in different parts of the world. Fortunately those searching for a low-mid priced China phone don’t need to worry too much about 4G, as it isn’t even part of the equation yet with MTK and the lower priced China phones. But in the near future, when the 4G network becomes more widespread and we become more data hungry, just getting by on 2G and spotty-3G won’t be enough.
Enter stage right is the RF360 from Qualcomm. Aiming at changing the game altogether with a shocking 40 bands of radio frequency compatibility over the widely used standards, including GSM, WCDMA, EV-DO, CDMA and LTE.
Beyond the range of compatibility, the Qualcomm RF360 also touts an impressive array of features. Packed in the RF360 is a dynamic matching tuner, integrated amplifier switch and 3D-RF. Qualcomm also promises power-saving, a smaller footprint and cheaper production costs with the RF360.
This is a phenomenal development in the ever expanding world of frequencies, bands and standards. I’m very much looking forward to a day when we won’t have to even concern ourselves with “will it work on my network?” – let alone, “will it work in my country?”. The Qualcomm RF360 radio brings us 10 steps closer to that reality.
We know MediaTek has announced some features of their MTK6599, which include some sort of LTE support. They’ve also announced there will be secrets revealed in the near future. Possibly an onboard radio similar to Qualcomm’s RF360?? Just a wild-guess, but Gizbeat’s wild guesses sometimes have a way of coming to fruition. If MediaTek wants to keep up with Qualcomm, they’d do well by figuring a solution to the burgeoning issue of frequency fraggle. Let’s keep an eye on it.
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