While on vaca­tion in Brazil, I missed Orange’s launch of 3G in France late in Decem­ber 2004. A friend of mine, Fab­rice Hamaide, CEO of Talk­way, is one of the first sub­scribers. Using his Sam­sung Z105U, we viewed Guy Roux from Aux­erre foot­ball club giv­ing a post-match inter­view on Infos­port. This was real time TV on a mobile phone and the qual­ity was great!

There are still a cou­ple of things to iron out. Appar­ently voice calls drop more fre­quently on 3G than on 2.5G. Also, the bat­tery runs out much quicker, so my friend sets 2.5G as the default ser­vice. He also car­ries an extended bat­tery pack, which adds bulk and weight to the phone.

Fab­rice then gave a demo of Talkway’s VMailTalk, stream­ing video by mail. Essen­tially, you leave a video mes­sage on your web­cam and upload it to a cen­tral server. You then e-mail the link to your intended recip­i­ent, who doesn’t need a plu­gin to view it … your video mes­sage will stream auto­mat­i­cally. Heard of voice mail? This is video mail. And guess what … Talkway’s stream­ing video mail works per­fectly on 3G.