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OM5G... Qualcomm teases next Snapdragon chip for phones: The 855 with a fingerprint Sonic Screwdriver, er, Sensor

Charlie Clark Silver badge

What changed was the arrival and mass adoption of full screen smartphones

By then (2008) they'd already given up on the premium data services. The increasingly ubiquitous wifi did for their grand 3G schemes, including the perennial white elephant of video calls: people weighed up the cost of a data contract over the alternatives and this effectively created a ceiling for data charges. Most European countries had enough operators that at least one of them was prepared to offer data only contracts for dongles and myfi devices.

In the US the smartphone, coupled with the lack of competition, did drive data contracts, investment infrastructure and harmonisation on UMTS and then LTE. But it was really the lack of competition that kept prices high.

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