Marvell Technology Inc (MRVL)

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S.J. on 3G

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118306134626851922.html
WSJ: A lot of attention has been focused in some of the initial reviews of the iPhone on the EDGE network that this phone is going to be on. Steve, we saw somewhere that your concern in putting a 3G chip in the first edition of the iPhone was that the current generation of that technology would drain the battery a lot, and that there were also some issues of coverage of the AT&T 3G network at the time you did this deal. Is that correct and have those issues been resolved over time as we've seen the technology evolve?

Mr. Jobs: You know every (AT&T) Blackberry gets its mail over EDGE. It turns out EDGE is great for mail, and it works well for maps and a whole bunch of other stuff. Where you wish you had faster speed is…on a Web browser. It's good enough, but you wish it was a little faster. That's where sandwiching EDGE with Wi-Fi really makes sense because Wi-Fi is much faster than any 3G network.

What we've done with the iPhone is we've made it so that it will automatically switch to a known Wi-Fi network whenever it finds it. So you don't have to go hunting around, resetting the phone, flipping a switch or doing anything. Most of us have Wi-Fi networks around us most of the time at home and at work. There's often times a Wi-Fi network that you can join whether you're sitting in a coffee shop or even walking along the street piggybacking on somebody's home Wi-Fi network. What we found is the combination is working really well.

When we looked at 3G, the chipsets are not quite mature, in the sense that they're not low-enough power for what we were looking for. They were not integrated enough, so they took up too much physical space. We cared a lot about battery life and we cared a lot about physical size. Down the road, I'm sure some of those tradeoffs will become more favorable towards 3G but as of now we think we made a pretty good doggone decision.

WSJ: Can you say whether 3G technology has evolved to the point where you're already working on including that in the next edition of the iPhone?

Mr. Jobs: No, we just don't comment on future stuff.