Amsterdam, June 13: Third-generation (3G) mobile phones offering fast Internet access should be kept from European stores as they are unreliable, expensive, bulky and offer too limited services, mobile operators said on Thursday. 3G phones are already being sold by Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa and Telekom Austria in Britain, Italy and Austria. But established European operators from Sweden, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Britain all insisted the 3G phones they were testing were unfit for consumers.

"We're debugging. They're just not stable enough," Pietro Porzio Giusto, vice-president at Telecom Italia Mobile, told Reuters at the 2003 UMTS Deployment Congress. Universal Mobile Telecommunications System is the European 3G standard.
Others said no handset could yet deliver all the promises of 3G telephony such as high-speed Internet access, crystal clear voice, video telephony and smooth handovers between radio base stations.

"Some handsets are good at handovers, like Motorola. Others are good at Internet packet data switching, but at the moment no single handset is good at everything," said Hakan Dahlstrom, head of mobile networks for Sweden at TeliaSonera.
Remi Thomas, director of Orange's UMTS network project, agreed, saying: "Some handsets are very stable (they do not drop calls) but won't have any of the 3G services."
Their comments come a few months after the first European 3G networks have started offering commercial services. Hutchison's '3' spearheaded 3G with a UK and Italian launch in March, with handsets from US-based Motorola and NEC. Hutchison was not present at the conference. Bureau Report