Just some Punq

Via DaringFireball, we get this snippet:

That Simultaneous Voice/Data Limitation

When Apple and Verizon announced their deal for the iPhone 4 last month, there was much hemming and hawing about a technical CDMA limitation: it doesn’t support simultaneous voice and data. My thought was: if this CDMA simultaneous voice-data restriction is a deal-breaker, how come we’ve never heard complaints about it from the 94 million existing Verizon customers?

… CDMA’s limitation only works one way: when you are on a call, you can’t use data. But when you are using data, calls come through. If you decline the call, data continues, almost uninterrupted. When you’re using the hotspot feature, if you accept a call, Wi-Fi clients receive no data for the duration of the call, but the Wi-Fi connection is not dropped. As soon as the call is ended, data resumes.

I haven’t run into a problem with this once in the week I’ve had the phone.

Mr. Gruber clearly doesn’t use the phone in a way where this limitation is important — and good for him, I suppose. But for people who use an iPhone more like I do, it is a problem. I use the iPhone extensively for work. This includes using it to research on-the-fly while I’m on a conference call, and using it to send information to other call participants. For me — and for many like me — not being able to use data while on the phone completely destroys the entire point of having a “smart phone”.

It’s a shame that Verizon’s network can’t support this feature; and I understand that for many people, it won’t be an issue. But it’s not so easy to dismiss as a non-issue for the rest of us.