We’ve had 98% 3G coverage for years and have already got 3.5G speed connections running in a lot of the country.

Nokia, SonyEricsson and Samsung (and latterly, LG) have thrown some very functional phones into the market that, on top of their network speeds, are great functional devices. To answer the question, I don’t know of any features that aren’t available to us (with the exception of the phone firmware upgrades being available at different stages depending upon your network).

And so long as the foreign network has a decent coverage, roaming data rates are about to plummet in the EU and the functionality works fine. I recently got a 3G connection in Ukraine of all places and it worked niftily.

I’m not up on what is the current state of US mobile usage, but certainly historically I was under the impression that the ‘gap’ as it were was due to a combination of cultural differences in how phones are used (text/web/voice usage) and also the availability of the network. Clearly, for the UK to have a fully functioning network with four providers, to completely cover an area that’s only two-thirds the size of California is far less of a task than that faced by US operators, many of whom are regional and can’t justify the cost of establishing an expensive high-speed network.

There’s also the complication of different arrangements in buying a phone contract here – almost always when you buy a phone contract in the UK you’re buying a handset too. I’m given to understand that you’re usually buying contracts and handsets independently of each other, and the two aren’t tied in?

Meanwhile, relative to the iPhone which hasn’t been around all that long, the N96’s predecessor (the N95) launched here about 18 months ago. I’ve been able to run SatNav off that, 5MP picture and video capture and 3G+ data speeds on that for longer than the iPhone’s been around. Hence why I say that the iPhone’s moving in on the other manufacturer’s territories.

So it’s still $70 compared to ~$40.