I wonder why these words haven’t come back to haunt Google. There is much speculation on the “Google Phone” pricing, but nobody has brought up this three year old quote:

Schmidt said on Saturday that as mobile phones become more like handheld computers and consumers spend as much as eight to 10 hours a day talking, texting and using the Web on these devices, advertising becomes a viable form of subsidy.

“Your mobile phone should be free,” Schmidt told Reuters. “It just makes sense that subsidies should increase” as advertising rises on mobile phones.

[via Reuters 11/11/2006]

With all this babbling about Verizon rushing out LTE for some non-dongle device and talks of the AT&T/Apple love affair breaking down, a simple question keeps popping to mind:

What happens when you don’t get LTE coverage? Aren’t you just going to get thrown down to the old CDMA? And the iPhone/iTablet is going to magically work with CDMA? Will the next gen iPhone have BOTH GSM & CDMA? Why is this never considered in any of the articles I read?

Update: Ran the benchmark on an iPhone 3GS 32Gb and saw yet another three-fold increase in speed.

Schiller was tossin’ around some pretty impressive benchmarks on the new version of Mobile Safari in iPhone OS 3. I’ve been using the OS 3 betas from the second they were available and definitely noticed speed improvements right off the bat.

These SunSpider tests were done on the same 2nd-gen 16Gb 2G iPhone on the same network. I’ve been saving these numbers for a bit, dang NDA, but now here they are:

Mobile Safari SunSpider Benchmarks