Will the T-Mobile Shadow II have 3G?
Oh, the dreaded question headline. It indicates that, in all likelihood, you will finish reading this post and not have an answer to the question.
And you won’t.
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ou’ll be left pondering, like us, whether the T-Mobile Shadow II, recently outed by the Federal Communications Commission (thanks, guys!), will meet the public with 3G speeds. The conundrum, as posed by AllShadow.com:
- The FCC documents clearly show that the Shadow II’s radio is capable of working the 1700MHz band. That, as you well know, is T-Mobile’s very own 3G playground.
- However, the post’s author, Mike Benton, writes that he has an unnamed inside source who says that the Shadow II won’t launch with 3G.
Benton’s conclusion? The phone likely won’t launch with 3G enabled in the initial ROM build, thanks to delays in T-Mo’s rollout. He posits that an update (official or otherwise) likely will turn on 3G at some point.
Shocking, we know, to think that a phone would launch at the end of 2008 and still not have 3G. But the idea isn’t totally without precedent. When the Palm Treo 750 officially launched on Cingular (now AT&T), 3G wasn’t enabled. (Edit: UMTS was available, but not HSDPA.) That didn’t come until the update to Windows Mobile 6, though an easy patch leaked out soon enough. At the time, Cingular’s high-speed network wasn’t anywhere near what we’re used to today, and T-Mo’s 3G network is still in its infancy, though it’s growing quickly.
