Windows Phone Thoughts: New NTT DoCoMo Hardware Takes Global Phones Closer To Reality

"The utter lack of true global 3G devices has nothing to do with hard-headed resistance to manufacturing them -- in reality, it's pretty fricking difficult to create hardware capable of efficiently supporting more than a few bands simultaneously, which is why triple-band 3G phones are just now coming to market in large quantities."

Ever hanker after a fancy new smartphone, then find out it doesn't support the 3G radio bands of your carrier? The diversity of mobile spectrums across the world means that it's near impossible for vendors to build phones that support all of them, not to mention crossing the GSM/CDMA divide. Now, NTT DoCoMo is presenting an 8-band radio that might overcome this hurdle at the IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium this week. If we're really lucky, that means we might see this technology in production handsets sometime in the next couple of years.