I recently took the Amtrak Acela from New York to DC for work. To my surprise I had about 80% of the ride covered in Cingular (sorry – AT&T) 3G service. Where I live, I only have EDGE, so when I travel I like to play with 3G as much as possible to see what my use cases would be.

I have a Blackjack USB tethered to my mac for DUN access. This is faster than Bluetooth, but for some reason the device doesn’t charge when being used as a modem. What a design flaw! The device has three modes when connected with USB – Mass Storage, Activesync, and Modem. Only the Mass Storage mode charges while plugged in, and you can’t plug in a separate charger while connected with USB.

Putting that ridiculous limitation aside, I did the basic web surfing, email, IM trio and it delivered a solid experience. I didn’t do a bandwidth test or anything, but lets say I wasn’t longing for my cable modem too much.

Now comes the fun part – streaming media. First, I tried to connect to my Slingbox at home and see how well it did.

[WARNING: The Quicktimes linked to from these images are large (10-15 megs), so you'll probably want to right click and hit "Save as"]

There’s no sound because I was the “quiet car” and didn’t want to disturb anyone. But the video quality was excellent and consistent as long as I had signal. Depending on the length of the signal dropout, it would pick right back up again.

On the way back, I tried a video conference with my colleague Ross. iChat AV never connects for me – it has tons of troubles with firewalls. But Skype worked.

The video wasn’t too bad on my end, and Ross said I had about a one second refresh rate on his end.

Given the USB charge limitation mentioned above, my phone would have probably lasted about an hour doing this stuff – which is why that limitation is so disappointing. The Acela gives you power outlets for your devices, so I’d basically have no issues if the thing would charge simultaneously.

As cool as this is, there’s the other step of removing the laptop altogether and doing this all on the phone itself. Slingbox works great right on the device, so that’s no problem. But there’s no reason I can’t do video conferencing from the device – except that it has no front-facing camera or software to enable it. This exists internationally now. But carriers treat video calling as a specific layer of their infrastructure – not just generic 3G packets going back and forth. So until US carriers implement this layer officially in the US and adopt devices that use it, we’re stuck with hacking it together. Cingular just announced that they will be supporting sending video clips to each other during phone calls, but this is not real-time.