news.yahoo.com — "CDMA is the less popular wireless telephony technology, used by 25 to 30 percent of mobile subscribers, and competes with the GSM standard used by about 70 percent of the world's 2 billion mobile phone users."
Jun 22, 2006 View in Crawl 4
veloscaperJun 22, 2006
Actually, GSM does have higher peak transmit power (overall, varies by phone too) but it also has quite periods with no transmission. While CDMA is pretty much on all the time. Take a look at the battery life of CDMA phones vs GSM phones and you will find GSM wins out with longer batter life. Guess who transmits more power overall.Not that it really matters. The Sun will heat up your cabeza more in a few minutes than a normal cell phone ever will.
aliengoodsJun 22, 2006
I've got a Treo 600. Great reception and long battery life. And GSM too, so I'm happy.
frem001Jun 22, 2006
thank god maybe this will encourage operators to switch to gsm and i can finally stop sending decent mobile phones to my brother, since the US is far behind on that front.
raingroveJun 22, 2006
fishbert, how is GSM a new technology compared to CDMA? and did you mean "obsolete" when you said "not that prevalent"?
andrew522Jun 23, 2006
gsm is a good technology, but unless all you are doing is talking, its not quite as good as CDMA. the new EVDO networks kick the s**t out of EDGE (edge= maybe 200kbps, and evdo= 500kbps-700kbps easy.), so for wireless broadband multimedia (like streaming video that both verizon and sprint have, and others lack), CDMA/EVDO is much better.yes, I know the rest of the world uses gsm, but the rest of the world also uses the metric system as standard.
veloscaperJun 23, 2006
@icdfetz, you are describing what is called the near-far problem and it applies to CDMA but not really GSM. In GSM, the access scheme is TDMA so users have specific times when they respond and so only 1 user should be talking at any specific time. However in CDMA, the C (for code, aka a barker code) in CDMA is what differentiates one user from another so there could be dozens of users talking at the same time. So the users close to the tower could block the signals (since using the same frequency) from another user(s) farther away whose signal would be in the noise of the user closer to the tower. So CDMA has no choice and MUST dynamically adjust user transmit power for the system to work. Its not a feature to save cell phone battery life, quite the opposite. A lot of system/network traffic overhead is involved with this and hence there is a lot of traffice back and forth eating up power even if you are not talking. To call it a power saving feature is pure SPIN.BTW, GSM does adjust cell phone Tx power just not nearly has frequently has CDMA because it doesn't have too.
kraussmJun 23, 2006
EVDO might kick the s**t outta EDGE someday, but not today, all the bandwidth don't mean s**t when it's only available to about 2% of the coverage area, I don't care much for the slow rates, but I get a connection almost anywhere in the country on edge or gprs
h0miJun 23, 2006
The GSM version of the 650 emitted more radiation than the CDMA version.