For years we heard how American mobile operators (they call them "carriers") were behind the mobile uptake sweeping the world.

Everyone talked about how Europe was great in mobility, thanks to the GSM standard being the glue that put all nations together, with easy roaming everywhere, and GPRS being a a great idea.

Then Asia Pacific, with the incredible use of mobile technologies in South Korea.

These days, what do I see? GPRS is still on, but main centres in Europe are fast to adopt UMTS. GPRS is really such a bad experience! As an alternative, smart operators started offering EDGE instead, which is a great improvement over the original packet based service.

You look in good old New Zealand and we have two mobile operators, offering mobile song downloads, video clip downloads (sorry, Vodafone, it's not mobile TV), wallpapers and ringtones, plus SMS services.

Some users complain of the quality of 3G services from Vodafone in certain areas, mainly in Auckland, where 1/4 or more of our population lives. The other side complains about lack of compeling mobile phones connected to the Telecom network.

And why Vodafone decided that GPRS was an ideal fallback from UMTS is beyond understanding.

In Europe some operators (ePlus in Germany for example) are moving to offer 3G services with Skype plans. And Hutchison have announced their plan to provide Skype on 3G smartphones (most likely powered by Symbian, although I used Skype on my HTC Apache a few times with great success).

T-Mobile in Germany is now offering an unlimited plan with a base cost, plus a daily usage fee - this way users know how much is the max they will pay at the end of month.

Meanwhile, in the USA, we hear about Cingular launching a commercial HSDPA network, first in the world to go live. I remember Vodafone NZ talking to clients about how they were going to run the first Nokia-enabled HSDPA trial for the group. Novelty goes fast, right?

Now I read AT&T/Cingular are launching a mobile service powered by Yahoo! Go Mobile. Still a portal, but it integrates the mobile phone with the users preferences and contents from the desktop.

And on the CDMA side we see how Sprint is pushing their location based service products, in partnership with Microsoft using Microsoft MapPoint.

Of course these kind of services are taking off in America: they have unlimited data plans! US$49.95 for all you can eat mobile broadband. Some mobile operators in Europe are even doing this now too.

I am really looking forward to the times we see services outside of the "walled garden" available to users savvy enough to know better (Vodafone live! anyone?), services that involve smart clients on interesting mobile phones (preferably smartphones, both Symbian or Windows Mobile), location based services available to the masses, not only to corporations, IM solutions involving the big ones (Yahoo!, MSN, AIM), and why not, satellite TV on mobile devices (like the HTC Trilogy announced by Virgin). Ah, and unlimited data, thanks.