buzzbuzz
ULTIMATE Member
IIRC launch era Three was unique in that they didn't provide any internet access at all. The business model was that you'd do everything within their walled garden. They didn't want you using WAP to access BBC News when you could pay 20p to watch a video clip of ITN headlines.
I had the candybar version of that NEC (I actually wanted the Motorola but Woolworths didn't have it) and remember doing exactly that precisely once, in the middle of a supermarket lol (I lived in a rural area so could only experience 3G when I was in town). I don't think most people cared about the new features. I had friends at school who had the 616 and even the LG flip phone even though there was no 3G coverage in the area.
Of course the 2G roaming agreement was originally with O2 and moved to Orange later on. I have it in my head that GPRS did work while roaming - but most of the walled garden would be locked out. I could be imagining that though.
you're talking about much much further back. I had a ZTE flip phone in 2006 like that, could only give you select data services from Three (sort of like a walled-garden), such as MSN Messenger, and sports subscriptions, I believe they even trialed an OTA TV service using 3G broadcast, although I never tried it.
I later had a Nokia N95 on Three in 2008 which could browse any website with the data add-on. This N95 and an iPhone 4 in 2011 could never get data when roaming on Orange GPRS though, had to be on Threes 3G network. The iPhone never said "no mobile data" either, instead it would just sit tirelessly trying to load stuff, which became a bit of a problem for iOS5 with iTunes in the Cloud, wouldn't skip to the next song in the playlist downloaded on device (like when you had no signal at all), instead just trying to endlessly download the tune and failing. iMessage and WhatsApp were already a thing at that point too, and they were also painful indoors, waiting for the fallback to SMS option to appear.























