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3G Is A Dog, And Other Truths
naylorjs writes: "This is an interesting article from the BBC about the technological future, in particular broadband and wireless. What makes it more interesting is the comments about nation states and such like. A certain amount of lateral thinking in use here, something that we don't see enough of in the technology field. IMHO."
I mean, really. Negroponte's always been so long on handwaving and short on actual technical pragmatism. And it's not like people have actually listened to a word the man said since "Being Digital".
Why is broadband good? "Different rhythm, different response time, different way of dealing with the web itself." Yeah, I bet that was your reasoning for getting DSL, too (if you happened to be stoned at the time). Except apparently you wouldn't want DSL because the order-of-magnitude speed increase over a modem "isn't giving the consumer enough difference". Apparently being able to stream live video to a handset isn't worth anything.
Well, thanks a lot, Nicholas. You can go back in your box for another five years.
-- Yoz
It was an interesting interview, don't get me wrong, but news outlets like The Register have been telling the truth about 3G for over 2 years - for some reason there's been a stubborn refusal to believe it - perhaps because it's not what we want to hear?
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Funny...for someone who works at one of the most technically-apt universities in North America, I didn't expect to hear this from him: Again, they have lost a lot of money on 3G for reasons that had nothing to do with the marketing side of 3G. It had to do with the terrible mistake made here in the UK over the auction process that was copying a bad American idea and repeating it here. It's a dog and people shouldn't want it and in fact I don't think it will see the light of day.
3G isn't bad. The American handling of 3G is, but you shouldn't punish consumers because of the fact you believe the standard is crap. If everyone cared about what America wanted in its consumer electronics standards, then America wouldn't be the sole dissenting voice in cellular standards. The problem isn't one of technology here, but one of corporate moneylust getting in the way of good ol' common sense.
Look at how consumer electronics devices have blossomed in the Orient...They've made 3G devices a part of their lives. The reason it won't work here is because our society as a whole looks down on a lot of the new technology as being fad-ish. Until marketers get a clue and discover just how to pitch these devices and demonstrate how they can complete our meaningless lives, they're not gonna take off.
Marketers for the last five years have been following the logic which carried them through the Internet bust, which was - "If you build it, they will come." Well, no shit, Sherlock...but you have to build something that's worth a damn to them. Quit trying to push off crap and market it as the next great thing...instead, make something that can change our lives, and prove that it will.
Many companies could afford to learn this lesson from Apple.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
A: First of all, put that in context that the largest amount of semi-conductor material to flow into the home will undoubtedly be through toys. It's not TV sets; it's not refrigerators; it's not PCs; it's not handsets - it's going to be toys. The reason I use that Barbie doll example is that the Barbie doll has to be connected in order to get stories, in order to get your content.
Somehow, I think the online contents for a Barbie doll will be quite minimal.
On a serious note, I think he's got a point there. Imagine one of these toys always getting an updated interface (audio) to interact with the children. Interesting.
One of the big problems of technology is that the world is broken into four groups who don't really understand each other.
Firstly, there are the technologists - the smart guys with their engineering PhDs from Stanford and the like who work for Ericsson, Qualcomm or Nokia. These people understand the technical reality of getting broadband services to handsets and the like.
Then there are the evangalists. These people post long, largely ill-informed, comments to slashdot. Sometimes they work for Gartner Group. If they're really lucky they get paid too much to work as VCs. These people don't really understand the technology, or consumers, but they tell a great story. Oh, and they love Amazon.com.
And then there are the business people. (And no, getting an MBA from Stanford does not automatically qualify you.) These people understand that 3G costs losts of money. They fret about what end demand will really be, and hire evangalists and technologists to try and raise some money. If they are lucky they get to sell their idea to some large company where the business development people really do have Stanford MBAs.
Finally, there is the other 99% of the population. Call them 'consumers'. They are rarely consulted about what they want; 'cause, hey, the evangalist tells a better story. Unfortunately, these are the people that actually buy and use the service. Unless consumers spend money the service will die.
So, to 3G: unless consumers see a compelling reason to massively up the amount they spend on telecommunications then 3G is in terrible trouble. ARPU for voice cell users is static or declining as penetration rises. (Why is this so? Because the handset, network infrastructure, maintenance, and license costs are much higher than 2G.)
So - where are the compelling applications that will encourage consumers to spend more?
Video phones, perhaps. Would you like a list of companies that died thinking consumers want to be seen on the phone. (Just think for a moment about the practicalities of walking down the street with your cell phone in front of you. Then think about the value of looking at someone in glorious jerky-and-small-vision with terrible lag.)
Stock quotes and charts, perhaps. Sorry, the days and number of day traders are on the wane.
OK. TV? Well perhaps, BUT think of the bandwidth requirements.
Email??? Sure, but a Blackberry or GPRS phone does it for cheaper.
Unless someone can find compelling *consumer* applications, then 3G is unlikely to be a commercial success.
*r
--- My dad's political betting
Have you ever really tried to do any of this stuff with a phone? Browse the web? Get your email? It's useless on a phone. The screen is too small and entering information into the phone is an exercise in frustration. Or you end up with a phone like the Kyocera which is a great palm, but sucks as a phone. Ever try actually holding it to your face and talking on it?
I'm all for cool technology and doing things that are cool just for the sake of doing it, but John Q. Public is never going to accept this stuff if it's a pain to use. It solves a problem that doesn't exist.
Scottaroo
----------
If your answer is Microsoft, you obviously didn't understand the question.
That's a little beside the point. In Europe, some operators make (Telia, Sonera, Orange UK) make more than 10% of cellular revenues from SMS. (Short Messaging Service, the GSM IM solution.)
Because SMS is a store-and-forward technology it is bandwidth unintensive (or at least, can be fitted around other network traffic). And at 15c a message, it is pretty lucrative.
Find the European cellular operator that makes less money from SMS than other data revenues. Right now instant messaging is the only data application that is remotely profitable.
--- My dad's political betting
According to the Pentagon, it would be detrimental to national security for them to re-tool equipment to use different frequncies. In the current political climate, nobody is going to force the issue.
Nicholas Negroponte is fairly bright, but I think some of the things he talks about (e.g. giving UN membership to Nation1, a "virtual nation" composed of the world's internet-enabled children) are a bit too loony to be taken seriously
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
I have a cell phone. I have a desktop. I have a server, and I have a portable MP3 player. I have a truck. I have a bike, and I have a muscle car.
I say that, to say this: I did not buy an El Camino. I bought a truck, and I bought (well, restored) a muscle car.
The same goes for my desktop and server. I did not buy an over powered dual-NICed desktop to also be my server on a dsl line. I bought a desktop, and a dsl line to connect to, and a Ultra Sparc in a colocated rack at a local ISP.
In the same sort of thinking, my cell phone doesn't play MP3s, although it can surf the web, I have never even bothered to try it.
To the average consumer, a phone should be a phone, first and foremost.
Features are good if they are free, but forcing me to pay twice the price for useless stuff I would never use, just makes me spend my money at another company.
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
-CT
The guy is a pundit dressed in academic clothing, nothing more.
With that as a backdrop, the truth is that what consumers want is a logarithmic scale.
I think this is the most interesting part of the article. IT is pretty much the only industry where consumers expect giant leaps in terms of performance before they upgrade. What other classical industry demands such high rates of devellopment? automotive? textile? Not really. People have come to expect more and more out of engineers over the years and the R&D to keep up with the demand has been ever increasing. Are we going to get to a point where progress is just too great and the users have no more need to upgrade, or is progress going to lag behind, thus reducing incomes and R&D --> vicious circle. I think there's a limit to how much speed is needed and that will give rise to a serious problem in a few years. What will happen when you can stream digital video uncompressed along with audio, playing games, etc on the same optic pipe? Will people go on upgrading endlessly just to show their friends "look, I can transfer my swap file from my PDA to my cell faster than you can!"...
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
I wouldn't necessarily say it's better to wait. More prudent perhaps.
Without early adopters it would take a lot longer for technologies to develop to the point were it will be suitable/affordable for the rest of us. You are welcome to wait but someone has to go first, and I think it can be admirable thing to do. They save the rest of you from waiting for the chicken/egg cycle to break.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
No one honestly cares! Now, before you dismiss this as "troll", let's take an honest look at the situation:
I have a Motorola StarTAC using Sprint's service. Now, outside of the occasional dropped calls, I don't have a complaint about the quality of the service. Guess what I use my phone for? That's right, sending and receiving phone calls, which is exactly what 90% of America uses their phone for.
My phone is "wireless web capable". I have never used it... it doesn't appeal to me. Everytime I've seen someone using "wireless web" it looks like a novelty. 4 lines with maybe 25 characters each... nothing particularly special.
I don't have a burning desire to check my e-mail from my mobile phone... the last thing I need is some damned electronic leash. If I'm not in front of my computer, it's because I'm not doing work; if I'm not doing work, the last thing I want is to be interrupted by e-mail.
My mobile phone has a PCMCIA interface to allow "dial-up" through the cell service. The attachment runs about $200, and the speed is 19.2Kbps. I would think that if you really needed to have a wireless internet connection, 19.2Kbps would be fine. Let's face it, if having an internet connection anywhere is THAT important to you, you're probably using it for business purposes. That means e-mail, possibly messaging co-workers. No, you can't VPN into the intranet at 19.2Kbps, but I wouldn't want to try it at the numbers 3G LIKELY produces ("see, you'll get 1Mbps, but only if you're standing still between these blocks during the vernal equinox...").
Most every mobile provider offers quick messaging, and several of them DO offer e-mail to the phone.
Instead of concentrating on videophones or MP3 trading or full-color sega produced videogames, how about improving the phones? My StarTAC is fairly small, but it's not as sturdy as I would have liked. Give me a a solid 2G phone with an aluminum or titanium skin that can take a beating, and a battery that gives me 8-10 hours talk time. I'll jump on that phone for $500 long before I'd buy a 3G videophone/e-mail device/Game Boy wannabe/MP3 player for $200.
The article misses some of the points of what 3G is about. 3G was developed to be a converging path of current technologies to integrate them in a more practical way.
Currently there is almost a different standard for each region / country on the planet.... where is the sense in this?
3G allows technologies based on TDMA/ GSM and those based on CDMA / IS-95b to meet somewhere.
IS-136 derived technologies will merge to WCDMA/UWC-136 and IS-95b derived technologies will merge to cdma2000/3xrtt.
Handsets that are 3G capable should be able to work with any 3G network through mediation carried out at the base station.
The added bandwidth, whilst integral to the standard, is only one part of it. This defiantly was not addressed 3G was called a dog.
bleh whatever....
I would rather a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy
I can see some uses for it from a user's perspective, but at 15c a message, why not just call the person? I'm currently paying 10c a minute for cell service and it would be easier to just talk to them rather than try to type it out on a phone. I'm sure the operators love it, though.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
All the arguments you have given are (kind of) true. But just check out Japan. Their phones have at least 160x160px (and less than 90 grams weight), most are in color. And that's more than enough to use "wireless web access". 4x25 was what killed WAP, it's not what will kill 3G.
Japanese people are tottaly into mobile phones. They use them for iMode, phone-calls, mail, surfing, sending eachother pictures and some-kind-of MIDI files etc. etc. etc.
The catch is that with 3G you will not have a phone anymore but a multimedia all-purpose communication device.
boky
Damn that's too cool. I mean, that's a lot of stuff.
But isn't paying for a _personal_ sparc server _and_ dsl line paying "twice the price for useless stuff"?
If you consider yourself joe average consumer, g3 would be expected to be a smashing success! You're not average though, and g3 flunks the big one -- but damn you've got some nifty toys! Just don't smack me over the head and tell me that you got all that _and_ a wife and family.
First, the Japanese culture generally seems to be more in to tech gadgets than the American culture. Look at some of the thigns (Tamagochi) that have been huge successes over there while enjoying at most a modest (and usually less) success over here. Just because many Japanese consumers like multimedia phones, doesn't mean many Americans will. I certianly won't buy one so long as my StarTAC keeps working.
Second, getting 3G up and running in the US is going to cost a LOT. Remember, Japan is smaller than the state of Calafornia. There is a lot more square footage in the US that would need to have 3G equipment installed in. That higher cost of startup leads to higher inital service fees, which most people don't want to pay. This is espically true if the objective is to provide good coverage and high speed access.
Also along those lines 3G will have adoption troubles until there is a nice nationwide network. Right now my CDMA 1900 Sprint phone can get signal in most any city in all 50 states as well as most all highways. Unless the 3G rollout is on a massive scale it won't be able to compete and hence I won't be as likely to want it. A service is pretty useless if you can't get it in your area.
Finally, one of the things I and many others I know value about our particular cells is they are small. My StarTAC, folded up isn't a whole lot bigger than a pager. Well if you try to whack a 160+ pixel LCD on a phone, it's going to get a lot bigger. Not something I want to lug around.
I'm not saying 3G is necessiarly doomed to failure, but they have some issues to work out soon. The American and Japanese markets are NOT the same thing.
Again, they have lost a lot of money on 3G for reasons that had nothing to do with the marketing side of 3G.
3G licenses were sold (marketed) at the peak of the hype (marketing) about 3G being the "next big thing". Telecom companies paid billions, the market collapsed and these companies end up with big overdrafts. Bug**r all to do with the technology, quite a bit to do with marketing.
It had to do with the terrible mistake made here in the UK over the auction process that was copying a bad American idea and repeating it here.
An auction isn't a way to market something? ... the method? Auction off N licenses when you
know that there are at least N+1 (at the time, very rich) companies who need a
license to stay in business. Noone dares to drop out of the auction process,
so the prices spiral.
Granted, the UK auction process was a mistake. In particular it was designed to make money for the government (which it did very well), instead of to boost a developing technology
It's a dog and people shouldn't want it and in fact I don't think it will see the light of day.
So this is the nub of his argument? "It's a dog"? Any reason for saying this? Technical justifications? Nope. Just "It's a dog" ... profound insight!
With that as a backdrop, (Conclusive proof that it's a dog) the truth is that what consumers want is a logarithmic scale.
You can currently get 9.6k over GSM. 3G gives you (at least) 144k. So he *does* like 3G after all! Either that or he doesn't know what he's talking about.
3G doesn't even exist. Some people might argue that it'll come in a year or two years (don't think the Japanese have it, that's not 3G).
Ah! That clears up whether he knows what he's talking about or not. Who's going to tell NTT DoCoMo that there 3G system isn't Negroponte-compliant? What about the Korean mobile networks who implemented a 2.5G system and found that it actually worked well enough to be classified as 3G?
The sad part, and this isn't being discussed enough, is that it's no good.
The sad part is that attention-hungry half-informed talking heads like Negroponte continually hype up new technology to ridiculous levels, for others to talk it down the following year. It's happened with Internet services, WAP, Bluetooth and now 3G. It confuses the public and discredits the industry - but it makes good headlines.
3G is a new technology which is evolving from 2G (well, duh!). Will it be implemented? Yes. Will it be successful? That depends on whether people find enough uses for it ...
Just like when the internet started noone knew what it will really be used for. Just like the internet, the closest thing to a 'killer app' is already available (email for the net, voice calls for 3G). Unlike the internet it's been hyped to heaven and hell before it's been born.
3G does need informed discussion, it doesn't need Negroponte.
You could ofcourse have checked the Media Lab website to see where Nicholas Negroponte is. He is still there on the webpage. http://www.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/
He is working there as a director in a foreign minister role. Not strange after having been its director for about 15 years.
Use Adsense for Charity
Because it's in many cases more convinient. Think about it: in the US it's common to have answering machines for sending short messages to people. Some people even get annoyed when you answer the phone, and ask you to hang up "so that they can just leave a message on the machine". You don't always want to talk to people.
Even though you can only cram 160 characters into an SMS message using 12 buttons of your tiny keyboard on a 3x10 character screen, SMS basically fulfils the role of mobile email. It may be expensive, but it's still very usable.
SMSs are also very non-intrusive. You can check your messages in the middle of a movie, or a meeting, or at midnight, and nobody would get annoyed by you talking on the phone at that time. If you suddenly remember something you needed to tell someone, you can just drop a small SMS to him. Some people send grocery shopping lists to their SOs - much better than reading one out loud, since you can always store the message and check it out when you're in a store. I personally use the text writing ability to store reminders for myself when my PDA is in my bag, or I forgot it somewhere.
In Finland, TV channels now run SMS -based chat shows when they have no scheduled programming. You can send your message to be viewed by everyone with a TV by paying only $1 USD! Sounds like a bad deal? Probably, but that does not stop people
sending hundreds of messages an hour to these moderated chat shows.
It's true what they say: in every new technology, e-mail is the killer application.
This may be hard to believe when you haven't seen it in action, but I think it's just a matter of time when the US also joins the SMS craze.
Q: You say digital technology will end the nation state and eventually produce a global cyber state. Now, speaking at this moment, that looks particularly wrong, doesn't it? You have a war being fought in defence of states; you have people who don't have states - Muslims and Palestinians - saying can we have a nation state, please? So, that prediction has turned out to be very wrong.
A: No, actually, it's turned out to be quite right. Let me explain how. Clearly, the notion of a piece of land, definable - these are atoms and they have an edge and a limiting contour - as something that you relate to as a culture or as an individual is extraordinarily important. What's happened is that the nation state as we know it today happens to be the wrong size. It's too big to be local and it's too small to be global; the UK is a perfect example.
For a better answer to this question, try reading Spiral Dynamics [www.spiraldynamics.com].
Spiral Dynamics theory concerns itself with what people and nations value, and according to SD there are about seven or eight basic value systems, or 'value MEMEs' that operate in people.
Each vMEME is colour coded for ease of reference--they are (very basically):
BEIGE: vaues instinctual basic survival eg. homeless people, starving masses
PURPLE: values ethnic tribes, family and mythic rituals, eg. superstitions, corporate 'tribes'
RED: values power, impulsivity, egocentricity, and rebelling, eg. streetgangs, frontier mentality, James Bond villains
BLUE: values conformance, absolutist principles of 'right' and 'wrong', Order, and the One True Way, eg. Puritan America, Confucian China, Islamic fundamentalism
ORANGE: values achievement, escape from the 'herd', the world is a chessboard and you play to Win, eg. Wall Street, Colonialism
GREEN: values sensitivity, communitarian human bonding, dialogue, relationships, multiculturalism, eg. Postmodernism, Greenpeace
YELLOW: values integration of all of the above, as life is a kaliedoscope of natural hierarchies, systems and forms.
So even with this very rough map of the different vMEMEs, we can tentatively see that the USA is predominantly an ORANGE (personal achievement, we protect our interestes) oriented culture, but also has a significant percentage of the GREEN (no culture is better than any other, USA is an oppressor) vMEME active.
Contrast that with other parts of the world that are still firmly set in BLUE--there is One True Way, Our God is the Only God, our culture is Good and it's order must be preserved.
Or even parts of Africa that value the tribe and where lines of kinship are considered very important (PURPLE).
And applying our vMEME map to the current conflict, it would seem that the Taliban is an unhealthy mixture of the BLUE 'our religion is True,' vMEME with the RED power striving vMEME (and we'll personally take power, commit terrorist acts, and kill any of our people who disagree with us).
And remember that many people devote maybe half their lives guided by whichever vMEME is operating in them, be it ORANGE achievement or BLUE conformity.
And yet, we're somehow supposed to believe that, given enough mobile phones, our differences are going to dissapear and we're going to form a Global Cyber State?
It's difficult to see how digitally connecting everyone on the outside is somehow going to make the differences on the inside dissapear.
Imagine a student phoning a terrorist:
Western student (GREEN): let's talk, for I aknowledge and respect your culture...
Arab extreemist (RED/blue): You are not of my culture, you are an infidel--die infidel, Die!!
Perhaps the trouble with Dr. Negroponte's answer is that he's looking, like a good technologist, from the outside, at the physical systems, and talking about stuff ilke 'the size of the state being wrong'.
But by using SD we can start to fathom the depth and breadth of the inner codes and values that are operating in people and nations, and why the conflict exists not just between states but also between the different vMEMEs operating within single states.
eg.:
'they attacked us and we are just in punishing them' (BLUE),
'we have to protect our oil interests and stabilise the area' (ORANGE),
'America is oppressive and interfering with minority cultures' (GREEN)
Your post makes sense. It is logical, rational and Plain wrong.
Consumers the world over have shown that text messages are a very good app for those mobile digital radio communication devices that we refer to as "telephones". And that they will put up with typing on a numeric keypad, message length limitations etc.
Which is why the providers who failed to predict this are scrambling to lessen those limitations and anonnoyances in the hope that it will help them sell thier brand of electronic widgets and services.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I can only give you Canadian prices, but if a VHS movie sells for $17 and the DVD sells for $27 and offers much better quality and more features, of course it's going to do well!
Laserdiscs were priced at anywhere from $80 to $170. Of course that's going to deter people from adopting the technology!
I have around 40 or so Laserdiscs, but most of them I got used or at inventory closeouts for under $20.
Hell, I got the original non-special editions of the Star Wars trilogy for US$24.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
"It's not where the lies come from - whether it's a silly website or a recognised authority - it's the absence of the filters. That's why again a more popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it, is a very, very important approach for the future. It's not done very much but it could solve issues of pornography, it could solve credibility issues of the kind you just mentioned."
o .html
Well I thought it sounded like one of my projects so thought it might be of interest to someone else..
Open image directory software: http://mlug.missouri.edu/~mogmios/projects/kigdem
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I'm very skeptical and I have absolutely no invested interest in this matter other than that as a consumer. Any one of the above questions can (or should) sink the worth of 3G in the respective countries. What's more, the question remains if the investment in 3G is more worthwhile than investment in other infrastructures and devices. For instance, I, for one, would rather have a seemlessly integrated PDA, Cell Phone, Wireless email (and maybe light weight web) device [similar to the Treo...possibly] than a cell phone with streaming video and little else [Especially given the current limitations on battery life, data entry, screen size, and so on.]
>I do think the drugs had started to kick in nicely by the end.
what could you possibly mean? Oh, maybe this...
If you are not making content for Barbie dolls today, you should start real soon.
I believe the original quote is
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"
- Groucho Marx
One of my favorites...thanks for reminding me of it!
It seems the fate of many new technologys goes something like this:
1) Hyped
2) Introduced
3) Debunked
4) Used
5) Taken for granted
(Of course, the process is not entirely linear.)
At the moment, a lot of people are debunking 3G,
a natural response to the hype. As there are no
phones on the market as of yet, it's too early to
say what will happen.
It's likely the people will, in fact, use 3G but
maybe not in the way intended.
(Much as the european phone companies had no idea
that SMS messaging would be a major future source
of revenue when the GSM standard was introduced)
Nicholas Negroponte is the same guy who predicted that there would be $1 trillion in e-commerce by 2000, and that micropayments will "change consumer behavior enormously.
Negroponte is yet another snake-oil salesman kept alive by the popular 'science' press.
They are always chasing sexy projects with results always being "around the corner".
Given the untold number of millions spend in the media lab, what do they have to show for it??
Interesting cultural generalisations, but email is incredibly popular in the US, and SMS is basically 'email in your pocket'. Maybe if the wireless operators made it easier to do SMSs, particularly across operators, it would take off, as it has done in the rest of the world, in cultures as diverse as Norway and the Philippines. I don't think the cultural argument really works, SMS already crosses far too many cultures - it's more a matter of making it available and easier in the US. SMS is already on a growth curve in the US, so it's only a matter of time IMO.
SMSs are often used when you simply can't talk on the phone - the classic example is school kids passing notes in class, but it's also useful in meetings and in nightclubs where it's too noisy to talk but you can text.
IMHO, the wireless operators in the US don't want interoperability simply because it prevents some form of user lock in. I would like to buy any phone I like and then shop around for the provider with the feature set and price that I like the best. I can't because each provider uses slightly different phones. It's going to be like the desktop IM battle, except with phones unless the FCC knocks all these companys' heads together and tells them to cooperate.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
The dropping grocery lists or other such things are nice and I already receive them via email on my cell phone w/o the extra cost. I just can't send them. Based on entering text for the phonebook in my cell phone, I certainly wouldn't use SMS very often. That is unless I had something like the Visorphone or any other PDA/cell phone combo where I could use a stylus.
I don't doubt that it's useful. I just can't see myself using an awkward interface and paying 15c a message for it. I'm a cheap bastard at heart.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
In the US, for most plans, they will ask for your Social Security Number in order to run a credit check. This isn't needed for prepaid plans, but when I signed up for one, they still wanted a picture id (drivers license), adddress, etc. IIRC, customer support still asks for some of that info. Of course ids can be faked, so it's not like any of this foolproof.
There are a few companies trying to make disposable phones that are made of paper and/or have such limited features that they are very cheap and the cost of the phone will be very small compared to the prepaid air time. How Stuff Works has an article about them too. From what I understand, you have the advantage of a standard handset that can be used with any provider. That's my biggest pet peeve with the US cell phone system.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
All I can say is that Europeans have fingers that work in a similar way to Americans and they have miraculously managed to adapt to two-way SMS keyboarding. At least two phone makers have released Qwerty keyboards, and in the US the Blackberry is very similar in keyboard to these devices.
Ditto for your statements that Americans aren't stupid enough to use SMS in the way I cited - clearly not everyone in Europe is stupid (or are you really that narrow minded?), and they are using SMS for this and many other reasons. I was only giving a couple of examples - SMSing in class is now banned in most UK schools (mobiles are handed in) but it's interesting that it even happened, and texting in night clubs is often used to hook up with other people later that night, so it's not exactly irrelevant.
A lot of what you are saying is a personal view expressed as an absolute - I'm sure they are true for you, but they probably aren't for many other people. Not everything that happens in Europe and elsewhere will take off in the US, but SMS may well do.
What's your problem with this statement? Untill someone implements micropayments, this prediction cannot be proved or disproved. So, what's your point? That he was wrong in the sense that we still don't have micropayments? Is that his fault?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.