SCENES of acute embarrassment marked the attempt to launch Europe’s first commercial third-generation cellphone service in Helsinki this month. A demonstration for journalists who flew in for the occasion showed only that the 3G system does not yet work reliably alongside today’s digital cellphone networks.
The 3G system is designed to deliver video and music online. But at the presentation, Nokia, the world’s largest cellphone maker, and Finnish telecoms company Sonera were reduced to showing poor-quality video sequences – around 10 pictures a second with 128 × 96 pixel resolution – which had been sent earlier by ordinary cellphones.
When the “launch” limped…
