Having used just about every PDA and now 'smart' mobile device there is from Palm through to iPhone for over ten years - I can say categorically that 3G is a big deal.

Stepping off a plane - I can sync my e-mails and appointments in seconds - not waiting ages for GPRS or EDGE to slowly grind away bit by bit whilst my life ever-so-slowly-passes-me-by. The Internet is never really a pleasure on any mobile device - but if I had to browse the World Wide Wait, I know which type of network I'd choose.

Why do I prefer 3G? Let's see... Push email is more responsive. Sending, receiving, downloading attachments - all quicker. I tick 'download the rest of this e-mail' and it's there, not churn, whirr, click, clunk, tsssk, pling, pop, fizzle, please talk amongst yourselves for a bit, oh it's here already!

Corporate VPN and remote desktop connections actually work. No - really - they do. The screen is real time, not what was happening on the server half a week ago.

Web applications esp AJAX ones actually respond. Fast enough not to through up those stupid 'unknown error' / 'server timed out' / 'error -23489' that you get when AJAX can't handle a slow connection. Which is about every single AJAX script in the known universe.

These examples aren't the fictitious apps of 'tomorrow' - these are the tools I use today. The 'on paper' difference between EDGE and 3G isn't just some slightly better percentage points - it's black vs white - it's the difference between "You'll actually be able to use this tool for some real work" and "Hey, it's got a great MP3 player".

In Europe, we're lucky that 3G has been with us for over five years - in fact for most of us we're already getting 3.5G with much more to come. I'm sure you're happy with EDGE - I was very happy with my 56k modem ten years ago - it was perfectly usable - but I wouldn't think of dropping my home broadband connection for 56k now though!