Nokia Announces WiMax Phones in "Early" 2008

[NatCh]

Nokia to launch WiMax phones in early '08

WiMax, or Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, according to good old, reliable Wikipedia, promises huge bandwidth or enormous range, or good bandwidth and nice range, and is looking like a good candidate for closing the "last mile" in home internet connectivity. Of course many people are just wondering when they can get a phone that takes advantage of it.

Well wonder no longer, oh tech hungry masses! Nokia, and Motorola, it seems, have come to answer your heart-rending cries for succor.

Nokia's closest rival in the handset market, U.S.-based Motorola, also plans to bring its first WiMax-enabled mobile phone to the market in 2008.

...

"Nokia plans to bring its first WiMax-enabled mobile device to market in early 2008," Nokia said in a statement.

But of course there is good with the bad -- while WiMax will give you great, cheap, wireless internet, it's apparently not well suited for actually talking over:

WiMax will make wireless broadband much cheaper to deliver--up to 10 times cheaper than current third-generation cellular telephony networks. But while it provides fast Internet access, it is not very well suited for wireless voice calls.

On the other hand, once we're all playing Internet Spades over WiMax, there should be much less drain on the cell voice infrastructure, so those poor losers who want to make actual phone calls will be able to get through.

From Reuters

[Bob Russell]

Intel seems to be the driving force behind WiMax these days, and I think that WiMax will be an important part of their announcements this week. (Along with the fun stuff about UMPCS and MIDs, that is!)

[TadW]

How grotesque... soon we can buy WiMax phones although there is no WiMax coverage.

Seriously, has anyone done research on how and where WiMax will be available?