In Jetsetter for the week ending Sept. 22, Japan gets another exclusive Kingdom Hearts series and ArmA III gets smacked down in Iran,

It’s time to make like Boutros Boutros Ghali with a Game Boy, because Jetsetter is coming at you! That’s right, it’s Digital Trends weekly look at the wide world of video games beyond the borders of the United States. North America may represent the biggest video game market and development community there is, but there are untold riches in the other 193 countries beyond Canada, Mexico, and the US. We write about those neighbors too, though. Come on; BioWare’s in Canada, so we’ve got to!

If you’ve got a hot tip from your nick of the woods, let us know about it in the comments. Particularly if you’re in Estonia, because that place has got to have some sweet games. You can also follow yours truly on Twitter at @ajohnagnello.

* Square-Enix announces Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD ReMIX at Tokyo Game Show.

Square is re-releasing the original Kingdom Hearts from 2002 yet again. The publisher announced at the Tokyo Game Show a brand new compilation for PlayStation 3 that includes HD remasters of Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts Re: Chain of Memories from the PlayStation 2, as well as all of the cutscenes from Nintendo DS game Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days. Why aren’t Kingdom Hearts 2: Final Mix, Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep Final Mix and Kingdom Hearts: Re:Coded included? Because what else will Square sell in the next package? This one is only announced for Japan and it may well stay there, as the aforementioned Final Mix releases have never left that country.

* ArmA 3 banned in Iran.

There aren’t many games that you can play legally in Iran at the moment. Trade sanctions on the country are keeping Iranian players locked out of MMOs like World of Warcraft, and that’s in addition to games banned by that country’s Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Want to play Assassin’s Creed III or Call of Duty: Black Ops II? Too bad because they engage in the “promotion of superstition and mythology.” You can add Bohemia Interactive’s ArmA III to that list as well. Since the military simulator depicts NATO forces repelling an invasion of Greek islands by the Iranian Armed Forces, the National Foundation of Computer Games in Iran has banned the game before it’s even out in stores.

* India gets new 12GB flash drive and 500GB PS3 models.

While Sony hasn’t announced prices for its new console models in India, it did confirm that the country is on the shortlist of those that will receive its new budget flash drive model. When Sony announced the details of the new PS3 at the Tokyo Game Show, only Australia, Europe, and Hong Kong were confirmed as markets for the 12GB flash drive PS3. MCV India reported on Thursday that India would also get access to the model. The 500GB console will also be available as part of a bundle. The 250GB model available elsewhere is getting the cold shoulder though.

How Do They Make Money shows you which popular tech companies are profitable and how they earn it.

Because of huge acquisitions like Facebook’s billion dollar purchase of Instagram, it’s easy to assume all tech companies are making a ton of cash. And so it may bewilder you to find out many popular web-based services are not turning a profit. There are also many online services that are earning money — some we did not expect at all — but we’ll get to that later.

If tech industry funding is something that interests you, How Do They Make Money can answer quite a few questions for you. The site lists a large number of different companies like Facebook, Tumblr, Pandora, and Netflix. When you click on one, a window pops up containing funding information. On the left-hand side it shows whether a web service is profitable or not and the information on the right gives examples of how it is funded. These money-making methods include things like advertising, subscribers, and selling data, among others. If one long list seems overwhelming, How Do They Make Money lets you filter choices by service or revenue type.

For instance, Dropbox is listed as “profitable” by offering paid subscriptions and freemium content. Instagram is apparently not profitable, but the following clarification is included: “Before selling to Facebook they were not making money.”

Spotify is not profitable either, despite offering advertising and paid subscriptions as part of its service. Competitor, Rdio, is also listed as not profitable. It’s extremely odd considering Instapaper is allegedly profitable through advertising and subscriptions. If an offline reading application, which has many free alternatives, can turn a profit then why can’t a music streaming service? 

One drawback to the site — and it’s a pretty big one — is that it doesn’t provide sources for the financial information listed. Actual earning numbers are omitted as well, only giving a thumbs up or down to indicate profitability but never listing how much money is brought in. This makes it difficult to take anything on the site without a considerable amount of salt. Unfortunately, if you’re after cold, hard facts and solid numbers then you’ll need to look elsewhere.

But despite the lack of transparency with its data, How Do They Make Money is still worth checking out. It certainly made us look at the free services we use in a different light. It’s unbelievable so much hard work and dedication can go into a product that may never make a dime. 

Did any companies on the list surprise you? Maybe we were shocked by the same ones!

We give the campaign and multiplayer modes in Firaxis Games' XCOM: Enemy Unknown a hands-on test drive.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown shouldn’t exist. It’s an enhanced remake of an almost 20 year old PC strategy game, spruced up by Civilization architects Firaxis Games, and releasing for consoles (and Windows as well) during a crowded holiday 2012 season. It’ll sell for a “budget” price of $49.99 when it hits stores on October 9, 2012, but arriving as it does amidst a flurry of big-name releases like Resident Evil 6, Dishonored, and Medal of Honor: Warfighter, the odds would seem to be stacked against it.  And they sort of are.

Fortunately for 2K Games, Enemy Unknown isn’t competing with the blockbuster shooters and other standard-fare action games that tend to punctuate holiday lineups. It offers something different, the rarest gem of all in fact: a strategy game that is actually fun to play on a console, using console-style gamepad controls. The PC faithful will no doubt quickly rise to defend the PC release of Enemy Unknown, and more power to them. But after spending an hour-plus with my hands wrapped around an Xbox 360 controller for some campaign and multiplayer action, I’m happy to report that this console-based strategy game is no unicorn, it’s the real deal.

Those of you who are familiar with UFO: Enemy Unknown won’t be in for too many surprises. The game that you remember from 1994 is largely intact here, though it’s looking a whole lot better in 2012. The story opens with extraterrestrial activity on Earth prompting an investigation by a crack squad of specially trained soldiers. This scouting operation plays out as a largely scripted tutorial mission that teaches you the basics of movement, combat, ability use, cover, and — as your four-strong squad is whittled down to just one — permadeath.

The controls are surprisingly simple to get a handle on, with players guiding a command reticule around the map for each squad member’s turn. A border painted around the selected troop indicates the maximum movement range for the first half of their turn. Push the reticule outside that boundary and a more distant border appears, showing the max distance you can move when dashing, which consumes both halves of that unit’s two-action turn. 

Combat actions and unit skills can be triggered by going into tactical mode with a press of the right trigger. The camera zooms into an over-the-shoulder perspective and a new list of icons appears at the bottom of the screen, an indicator of which abilities you can call on. From this perspective you can see which targets are in view and what your chances to hit it are. It’s a surprisingly light flow of data, but in the act of playing you quickly realize that it’s all the information you need.

Over the course of three missions (two if you don’t count the tutorial), I was able to get a sense of Enemy Unknown‘s tactical flavor. Again, UFO fans won’t feel lost here at all. The controls offer all the flexibility you might need for advancing through each environment while maintaining tactical control of the battlefield. The alien aggressors enter the fray in scripted, and sometimes unexpected, locations, but the game doesn’t feel cheap. The few times my attackers got the drop on me, it quickly became clear that it was my own tactical planning that was at fault.

Wrapping tightly around the turn-based action is a larger meta-game focused on building up your alien-fighting arsenal. All of this plays out from your underground mission control, rendered in the game as a cross-section view of various facilities. Between missions, you can visit the barracks to assign skill points you’ve earned among your finite number of troops and mess with their loadouts. You can also visit the research or engineering departments, directing their respective teams to focus their efforts in one direction or another. Alien materials picked up at the end of each mission fuel your research team’s efforts, and their discoveries can then be produced as actual gear to outfit your troops with by engineering.

There’s also a situation room where you’re able to monitor the general state of the world as aliens descend. The panic level of each nation determines whether or not it’s helping you in your fight against the invaders. Let one nation’s panic level get too high, and you’ll lose any associated support from there. Throughout the game, players are presented with decisions to make. Even the location of your starting base is accompanied by a choice, since the different regions of the world offer different benefits, such as reduced prices and build/research time.

In terms of missions, you might be presented with a pair of reported E.T. sightings that need to be investigated, with the caveat that the panic level will rise in whichever of the locations you choose to not visit. There are also some missions that you’re simply locked into. One early task, for example, was assigned to me by the shadowy Council charged with waging war against the alien invaders. There was no choice to be made in that case; the Council handed down orders and I, faithful soldier that I am, responded.

The meta-game disappears completely in Enemy Unknown‘s 1v1 multiplayer matches. Instead, each player has a budget of points to work with and the ability to spend those points on forming a squad of up to six units, pulling from either/both the human and alien factions. The size of the budget varies according to the match settings, but the general idea is that both players are limited by the same resource constraints to come up with the most effective team that they can. There are a lot of variables at play, to the point that even just building your multiplayer match team can take quite a bit of time, but the game thankfully allows players to save lineups that they’re particularly fond of.

The flow of a multiplayer match is much faster than that of a campaign battle, largely because there’s a time limit on each player’s turn. The default right now is set at 90 seconds per side, which means you’ve got 90 seconds to issue orders to all six of your units. In practical terms, that window felt just a bit too short at the beginning of the match, though the time-per-turn is fortunately one of the many pre-match variables that players can adjust.

Beyond the 90 seconds, I blame part of the rushed feeling on a clunky interface. The actual controls are well-designed, but the preview build’s command reticle wasn’t as sticky as it could have been with cover points, which resulted in me sometimes moving a unit to an out-of-cover position. The D-pad-controls for cycling through the various combat options in tactical view wasn’t as responsive as it could have been either, to the point that I’d sometimes have to press left or right multiple times for the command to register. These issues were present in the campaign missions I played as well, though there are no time constraints to rush you along there, making the clunkiness much more manageable. This is all based on playing with a preview build of the game, of course, but it’ll be something to watch for in the final release.

Overall, XCOM: Enemy Unknown seems to deliver on its promise of re-creating a classic PC game from 1994 for modern audiences. The basics of what made the original worth revisiting with a remake are still very much intact, and the console-specific control scheme works shockingly well. The overall presentation, particularly with the cutscenes, voice acting, and so forth, definitely speaks to the budget price tag, but the actual play — at least in the handful of early missions and one multiplayer match that I sampled — promises all of the tactical flexibility that fans of the original will go in expecting to find.

We stop for a chat with Tech21 and saw first hand why the company's line of "Impactology" smartphone cases are so darn sturdy.

With the arrival of the iPhone 5, smartphone accessory companies are all undoubtedly racing to get their products heard to be the selected choice of accompaniment to this season’s hot new gadgets. Of the many phone cases we saw at Pepcom Holiday Spectacular in New York City this week, Tech21 definitely caught our attention. At first, it was the array of neatly boxed, sleek cases that brought us over to the table. But then, the orange goop. Oh, the orange goop.

I spoke to Michael Pratt, the U.S. rep for Tech21 (a United Kingdom-based company), who was more than willing to explain and demonstrate why Tech21′s cases provide a scientific solution to case durability. This brightly colored putty is actually the “D30 Impact Material” Tech21 crafts its cases with, and the putty, in its raw form, is extremely malleable and bouncy. When you roll it up into a ball and drop it on the floor, the material springs immediately back up. The ability for it to alleviate tension allows the case to protect your gadgets better, because D30 helps to distribute the force when the case is dropped rather than break at that sweet spot that receives impact.

What was ever crazier is that Pratt was more than willing to show me how sturdy this goop is. A few fingers under the impact material and right hand armed with a mallet, he slams the mallet straight onto this own left hand with the goop as his only protectant. The result? He was fine, I was thoroughly shaken, and the demonstration was slightly gimmicky but makes it clear: this stuff is hardcore.

With the material, Pratt says this allows Tech21 to build cases that are thin, lightweight but more protective than ever. The new line is available now for the Samsung Galaxy S3, iPhone 4/4S, and HTC One S; the iPhone 5 lineup is expected to be out within a few weeks. Cases start at $40 and go up for bigger, badder, more extensive gadget care. We have to admit, the whole hitting your hand behind a putty thing may be a bit of a showoff tactic, but the scientific explanation and molecular level logics are definitely intriguing.

And so, after plenty of overnight camping and hullabaloo, the Apple iPhone 5 has officially been launched into the mobile world. The assumption is that when you buy the iPhone 5 on subsidy that it’d be locked to that service provider. That’s mostly true, except when you buy it from Verizon, because it comes unlocked.

This has now been confirmed by the Verge. If you go out and buy the iPhone 5 from Verizon, assuming that you can find stock, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to hear that the iDevice comes fully unlocked right out of the box. What this means is that you can go ahead and replace that Verizon nanoSIM with one from AT&T or T-Mobile and have it work too. This is particularly useful if you are traveling internationally, because it means that you can pick up a prepaid SIM at your destination and avoid those nasty roaming charges. Of course, many carriers don’t have prepaid nanoSIMs yet, so you may have to break out the scissors and carefully snip the regular SIM or microSIM down to nano-sized proportions.

The good news is that the Verizon iPhone 5 should be fully compatible with the 3G network from AT&T. The bad news is that it won’t work with AT&T’s 4G LTE, since it uses different bands that Verizon. This also means that you’re likely stuck with 2G/EDGE if you pop in a SIM from T-Mobile, though Old Magenta is reportedly rolling out some iPhone-happy 4G HSPA+ coverage in cities like Seattle, Las Vegas and New York.

We go hands on with Halo 4, and try out the campaign, competitive multiplayer, and the cooperative mode as well.

Things were still frantic at Microsoft’s 343 Industries studio in Kirkland, formerly home to Bungie. Although key members of the development team had set aside the day to give select media the first hands-on experience with campaign gameplay and new Spartan Ops and War Games missions and maps, the rest of the 200 developers were in crunch mode as the November 9 global launch loomed.

“It’s been a long haul,” said Kiki Wolfkill, executive producer of Halo 4. “It’s been three years since we started developing the project and we’re now in the final stretch. This is an amazing time for us. Crunch time is always an emotionally intense time. We’re trying to make hard trade-off decisions and letting the feet off the gas. There’s a lot of excitement and anxiety to finally get the game out there with campaign and multiplayer first hands-on.”

Wolfill and the rest of her team have nothing to worry about. Halo 4, at least from the two campaign missions, two Spartan Ops missions, and half-day of War Games combat I played, delivers the patented blockbuster sci-fi experience that gamers have been waiting for. Passing the baton from Bungie to 343 Industries has been seamless from a gameplay perspective. With their involvement in the development of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary along with Saber Interactive and Certain Affinity, the team is keeping what fans love about the Halo franchise and pushing into new territory with Halo 4.

Campaign

In Mission 1, “Dawn,” Master Chief is awakened by Cortana when a Covenant ship attacks. The action takes place in 2557, which is exactly 4 years, 7 months, and 10 days after Master Chief settled into cryo sleep at the end of Halo 3. Once awakened, the player needs to fight through the ship, which is being swarmed by Covenant soldiers. The big action set piece at the end of this level takes place outside in partial gravity with enemy ships coming in and Elites, Grunts, and Jackals engaging from every direction.

This level serves as an appetizer for Halo 4. In fact, the game’s logo doesn’t appear until after you’ve survived this exodus. It eases players back into the Halo gameplay and brings newbies up to speed on what’s going on in the Halo universe. Things are both familiar and fun.

The game’s third mission, “Forerunner,” introduces the Prometheans to the mix. It changes everything. Master Chief and Cortana are trapped on the planet Requium, and are tracking a signal that’s from the UNSC Infinity. This level introduces all-new gameplay mechanics for contending with the Premethean threats. And all three are formidable challenges. They’re as different from the Covenant enemies as you can get. And with the latter part of the mission, players will actually be taking on both Covenant and Promethean enemies at the same time. (Luckily, they also are fighting each other when not engaging with Master Chief.)

There are three major enemies that players will be fighting from this new alien race — Knights, Watchers, and Crawlers. Any combination of them requires a different strategy. Knights can phase in and out of time, Crawlers can walk on walls and ceilings and they can attack like a pack of feral dogs. Watchers are a support class. They can regenerate Knights and actually fit inside Knights to protect them. The Prometheans will coordinate their efforts, which makes battling them extremely challenging.

“We want the Prometheans to feel like the most advanced enemies in the world,” said Brad Welch, lead multiplayer designer, Halo 4. “The Prometheans introduce a half-dozen new weapons which are a cross between being human-designed and these crazy and futuristic designs. It was important to be able to identify that a shotgun is a shotgun. Each weapon comes together and forms in your hand when you pick it up, and there’s a glowing energy stream that runs through the barrel to give the weapons a sense of life.”

As challenging as the Prometheans are to fight, it’s imperative to find their discarded weapons in taking the battle back. Once you get a hold of these weapons you might not want to go back to UNSC or Covenant arms (unless you’re forced to). Each weapon has dual fire modes like the bolt pistol, which has a shotgun blast that when you hold and charge it up can perform a one-hit kill. I also like their grenades, which can be used strategically to take out a large number of enemies. These enemies are very smart.

Not that you’ll have much time to take in the scenery, but watching these Prometheans die is always a unique experience. That’s because an enemy will de-res from the location of your kill shot. Perform a headshot kill (which is really the only way to get these enemies efficiently), and watch their bodies slowly and colorfully evaporate. Fire off a ton of rounds at a Crawler and watch as that last leg shot serves as the origin for the final seconds of its life. It’s this type of cool little detail that shows how far 343 has gone in crafting a living, breathing world that you’ll want to lose yourself in.

Spartan Ops

“Spartan Ops is our new episodic cooperative gameplay that’s part of our Halo Infinity multiplayer experience,” said Wolfkill. “There’s War Games, which is our competitive multiplayer game experience and there’s Spartan Ops, which is our cooperative episodic experience. Every week you’ll get a story episode with five missions. We have an amazing story arc planned out. It’s like a TV show that you get to play with your friends featuring some characters from the campaign.”

I was able to team up with three others and play through a pair of new Spartan Ops missions — Land Grab and Sniper Alley. It was my first time playing this new four-player co-op. And I highly recommend that gamers enter Halo 4 through this cool new mode. Even replaying the missions was fun because of the open sandbox gameplay and the four unique players taking out Covenants in a desert landscape always played out differently. The ability to play with big toys like the new Gauss Warthog and Covenant vehicles in Land Grab adds another dimension to gameplay. While there was more on-foot action in Sniper Alley and a different feel to the pacing.

Before jumping into a mission, players are able to gear up their soldier from head to toe. The amount of customization is amazing. You can customize up to five load outs. There are primary weapons, secondary weapon, grenades, armor capabilities, tactical packages and upgrades. Everything will be unlockable in the game, including all of those cool new Promethean weapons. How you equip your Spartan will impact your success in a mission, as will how good your teammates are. Playing together is important. This mode is something I see people jumping back into and playing again and again just for fun.

War Games

343 unveiled a brand new Dominion mode for War Games and a new “Solace” map, inspired by a Promethean environment. Dominion is a six-on-six game that’s on two teams and three bases. And things get really crazy really fast.

“These three teams are fighting over these three bases and, as a team, you’re charged with capturing bases, fortifying them, and resupplying them,” said Welch. “That’s how your team gets points. When you capture a base — you can take it from either the beginning of the match or you can steal it from an enemy team — it becomes allegiant to you. It will drop weapons for you. The turrets will only shoot at your enemies. The shield doors come online. And that’s all through the fortification phase. Once it’s fortified, the base just gets larger and all sorts of weapons come up, shield doors, turrets. Vehicle pads start charging and then once the base starts resupplying, your team is going to earn more points and weapons will start dropping on the base. That’s how you get lots of power weapons — either by attacking the other bases or defending your own base.”

This mode changes the strategies involved in team-based play. And with teams constantly trying to arm and disarm bases – outside of the normal killing everything in an opposing colored uniform – there’s a constant ebb and flow in battles. It makes for a fast and fun experience that makes you want to keep coming back for more. There will be four maps at launch, and I was able to play two of them – “Longbow” and “Exile.”

“Longbow has three really well-defined bases that are entrenched in hills in very strategic locations,” said Welch. “There’s a base on the high ground that spawns flying vehicles and the low ground bases spawn the ground vehicles. That was our first prototype map for the mode and it’s really evolved.”

In “Exile” there’s a base inside a crashed ship that’s in the center of the map and the others are in the military encampments that are from the survivors of the crashed ship around the other side of the map. The turrets are positioned in a way that they defend the base if someone is coming at them, but they’re not so overpowering that you don’t just run and die when you run at them. They force you to take a different road towards the base or they help a player defend it.

I was also able to play other maps. There’s the new “Solace” map, which features two bases laid out in symmetrical fashion and has a Promethean environment. Welch said it’s best for five-on-five Capture the Flag, or four-on-four Team Slayer. It has similarities to “Narrows” from Halo 3, but it holds its own as a very unique map. 343 also showed off “Haven,” which is a small, really hyper-competitive Forerunner map, and “Adrift,” which is set up like an abandoned UNSC mining vessel.

Multiplayer, clearly a focus for the team at 343, is shaping up to be an experience that will evolve over time and keep things fresh for those who want to continue their immersion in this massive new saga. The gameplay stands out, much like the campaign levels, as being both familiar, yet new. That’s a tough balance to keep. But with so much anticipation and the bar raised so high for Halo 4, it’s looking like 343 will deliver on all levels.

A cesspool of acronyms, overoptimistic marketing claims and incompatible technologies has made 4G incomprehensible to the average consumer. Now carriers will suffer for the mess they’ve created.

Recently, the investment firm Piper Jaffray conducted a study that found a full 47 percent of U.S. consumers don’t feel the need for 4G. This isn’t good news for the carriers, which have been fiercely touting their 4G networks for a few years now. Almost all new smartphones have some kind of 4G connectivity, including the new iPhone, at long last.

Part of consumers’ apathy over 4G might come from their inability to understand the difference between different flavors of it. The same survey found that 51 percent of consumers said that all 4G networks are the same. Not only can’t they name which is best,

That’s bad news for an industry as competitive as wireless communication, with recent marketing campaigns based upon name calling as a means of brand differentiation. With carriers betting ever more heavily upon data tiers as a main revenue stream, what can carriers do about consumers who don’t seem to understand their services?

How to be 4G

Confusion is the name of the game, and the carriers haven’t helped explain to consumers the benefits of 4G. Commercial mobile technologies are standardized by a complex number of bodies such as the ITU (International Telecommunication Union), the 3GGP (3rd Generation Partnership Project), and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Still reading? Good. They are tasked with bickering until they set a strict, definite standard for each iteration.

These powers that be hold conferences, conduct studies, and perform secret ritual sacrifices in order to define what it each G – or generation – actually means. 4G is, of course the next numerical step, but the powers stumbled when it came to defining what that actually meant.

Strange encounters of the fourth generation

The 4G war got off to a specular fail from a marketing standpoint. There were many, vastly different technologies all vying for subscribers.

Sprint tried to get the ball rolling with WiMAX in 2008, a technology descended from the same tech in your Wi-Fi router. It was branded 4G, though real-life speeds were often more equivalent to a particularly fast 3G device. This was promising, but Sprint eventually declared the technology dead and migrated to LTE (Long Term Evolution, if you were curious). One down.

T-Mobile further muddied the waters with an upgrade to HSPA+, which is technically more like 3.5G, but which has been branded 4G.

AT&T had a wide, but much decried 3G network (partly blamed on iPhone exclusivity for years). While AT&T deploys its 4G LTE network nationwide, it’s also making things needlessly confusing by offering HSPA+ alongside, and branding it 4G just like T-Mobile. If you have an AT&T iPhone 4S, you might see a 4G logo appear sometimes, but it’s not the “true” 4G LTE you would get by upgrading to an iPhone 5.

Verizon launched a 4G LTE network in late 2010 – in its truest sense – it fulfilled the 4G guidelines.

Simple, right?

Setting low bars

No. Not simple, at all. Once the carriers got to building their new networks, the powers that be decided to change the definition of 4G. They lowered the minimum speed guidelines, so that carriers wouldn’t have to do too much heavy lifting, meaning that 4G networks would not be as revolutionary as they had first planned. Hence the bickering over “true” 4G. On top of that, building 4G networks gave carriers a chance to improve their existing networks with beefier backhaul – the connections that tie cell towers back to the backbone of the Internet. This greatly improved 3G speeds and availability, closing the gap between 3G and 4G.

It’s not surprising that the average consumer doesn’t care about 4G when they don’t get it, and 3G networks are progressively getting better. Coverage matters more than speed to many people — a souped-up network means squat if there isn’t a tower in your area.

The consumers don’t care

With so many different carrier definitions of 4G, and even an official designation that’s a moving target, it’s hardly surprising that people are confused. So what can the carriers do?

Agree on a standard speed definition. This is probably impossible, because the telecom industry is notorious for talking at, rather than with each other. But setting a baseline speed for 4G would at least let customers know what they’re being promised.

Stop slapping 4G on everything. This is really aimed at AT&T and T-Mobile, which are allowed to brand older HSPA+ 3G tech as 4G due to a magical shift in definitions back in 2010. While this is legal, it confuses people to a point where they don’t care.

Stop lying about speeds. Advertised speeds are not the same as real world speeds. T-Mobile might advertise 42mbps, but that’s the theoretical limit. That doesn’t look so rosy when you’re getting 45kbps downloads. Averages work much better, and leave less room for error.

Change phone branding conventions. While some handset-makers are responsible for this, it isn’t in a carrier’s best interest to have a phone named after wireless services. For example: The HTC EVO 4G LTE. Not the easiest name to understand. This particular model caused a friend to ask “What is a 4G?” as if it were some kind of new device. Apple keeps it simple with 3, 4s, 5 and so on. Heck, even Samsung does with its flagship line of Galaxy phones (S2, S3). I wonder where that inspiration came from?

Conclusion

The carriers have themselves to blame for the consumer confusion they’re currently stewing in. Unexplained acronyms, incompatible networks, technologies that vanish as soon as they’ve appeared – it’s as if they’re running Area 51, not voice and data networks. Carriers have the leverage to make the average consumer more interested in 4G, but it’s all up to them.

More speed is nice, but most of us would just settle for better reception. After all, if a guy with a mohawk can put a robot on Mars with less cash than it took to put on the Olympics, why can’t I have cell reception in an elevator?

Apple rolled out its first TV ads for the recently-launched iPhone 5 late Friday. The four slick 30-second skits all feature a voiceover by actor Jeff Daniels. Meanwhile, an amusing video making fun of the new design is clocking up masses of hits on YouTube.

After a series of TV ads in July which were considered by many to be a bit on the lousy side, Apple has had another try – this time with its first ads for the iPhone 5.

Called Thumb, Cheese, Physics and Ears, the slick 30-second skits, each with a voiceover from Newsroom star Jeff Daniels, focus on various aspects of the Cupertino company’s new handset.

Meanwhile, a parody ad posted on YouTube poking fun at the refreshed smartphone has clocked up almost 1.5 million hits in just a couple of days….more on that in a moment.

First, the new ads by Apple. Thumb shows how the new screen – taller but not wider – allows for single-thumb operation of the device. Perhaps fearful of consumers jumping straight for handsets with bigger screens, such as the Galaxy S3, Apple has decided to highlight one of the advantages of its widescreen design. 

Cheese demonstrates the new Panorama feature enabling ultra-wide shots; Physics shows off the dimensions of the new device, asking how something can get bigger while getting smaller; and Ears takes a look at the new EarPod headphones bundled with the smartphone.

If you want a chuckle though, head straight to the parody ad at the end of the page, created by Seattle-based production company Cinesaurus – it’s all about ‘the tallest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone.’