Slashdot Mirror
How Great Cheap Phones Never Get to the U.S.
prostoalex writes "Gary Krakow from MSNBC is impressed with Motorola's C116 phone only to find out that that the phone is not available in the US. The reason? 'A very, very basic GSM handset that handles incoming and outgoing calls as well as SMS messages, the C116 is sold all over the world -- except for the United States. It's not sold here because it's too cheap!' The phone is targeted for emerging markets, where people don't like to tie themselves into monthly contracts, and with little value proposition presents little interest to US wireless operators."
I moved back to India last year after spending 10 years in the US. I found that the cab drivers here have better mobile phones than most people in the US. I guess it has to do with monopolies and regulations..
"I would like to see phones unlinked from the service providers, much as personal computers are separate from the DSL and cable broadband providers. Imagine if you had to buy a Verizon PC or a Comcast Macintosh and if you switched from Comcast Cable to Verizon DSL you'd need to buy a new PC!"
Ahh yes, the contract game...
Nothing stops you from using an unlocked phone (a phone that is not restricted to the provider) with your sim card on a GSM network. The problem is many cell phone companies, at least in the US, are locking the phones to their provider. They are willing to give you the unlock code, but it seems to be a matter of getting the right person on the phone and waiting a certain period of time before they are willing to do this. So you could technically travel from one provider to another with the same phone.
After getting some rebates on a "locked" phone in exchange for another long-term contract, I sold the phone at full price on eBay and bought a much better phone. After my contract expires, I can technically bring this phone over to any GSM mobile provider.
Another industry "secret" seems to be that you can walk in with an unlocked phone and demand to go without contract - they claim they will not turn down a customer, but this is only if you have an unlocked phone, apparently...
There are a large number of factors that go into the selection of handset models for both the U.S. post-paid and pre-paid markets: features, cost, size, manufacturer support, durability, radio quality, and audio quality among them.
/. users may already know exactly what data services they need/want because they have fearlessly tried them, explored every menu of their phones, and come to a good conclusion as to what is worth paying for. Many people haven't. They only discover a new feature because they see some geeky person use it in a cool way that they'd never imagined, and say "I wish my phone could do that." To which the TruGeek replies. "That's a Nokia 6682. It can take even better pictures than this and send them right to your Inbox. Let me show you how." It may sound like paternalism to sell people phones with more features than they currently think they need, but it's not. It's just good marketing.
Major carriers have an allotted sum that they can contribute to a person's first handset based on their one-year contract commitment. People in the handset selection teams for these companies choose the phones with the best feature set for that amount of money. There is no bonus for selecting a phone that is cheaper than this amount.
Less expensive phones sometimes get that way by choosing inferior components, and antenna designs. But not always. The only way to know whether a phone was cheaper due to clever engineering or cheap components is to completely reverse engineer the design with a every competent team of engineers, or deploy thousands of them and carefully watch the complaints.
The drive for Zoolanderesque micro phone sizes is over. There is such a thing as too small and consumers have figured this out.
Though there is certainly some deviation from the post-paid phone standards for the pre-paid phones each new model has a cost in customer care training time and handset replacement programs.
There is a push to make more data services available and some favoritism is shown to those handsets that can offer that content.
When you combine these factors you have a recipe for "I told you so's" The article's author didn't find the buttons too small on this phone (though many would), and where he was, the radio was adequate (though in tiny phones, penetrating the human hand is a definite problem). This phone will never let him "discover" the joys of sending cool pictures at the zoo to his grandkids e-mail boxes (which he may already do with with Coolpix 8800).
In summary. Geeksight is 20/20. We can mathematically determine that there is a slot for this in the American market, but marketing is stranger than chaos theory. And I would like to suggest that the article's author, go bid on the one for sale on ebay (right now AU $20) put his SIM in it. It doesn't get much cheaper than that, and then he could leave the article writing on handset marketing to people with a statistical sample > 1.
[disclaimer: I am a Treo650 fanboy who still has his T68 on the charger]
If you lock the phone, there are phreaks who would break the lock for a puny three dollars.
Of course there are a few companies which offer CDMA and basically lock you down with 5 year contracts, but the TRAI (Telecom Authority) here cracked down so severly on such a company, that they have switched to Freedom of consumer.
TRAI here is very active and if not, the supreme court steps in to "regulate" the market.
I hold a corporate plan from AT&T here. There is NO contract, and the billing is purely month-to-month. If they try to "add pork" to my bill, i would carry my number and switch to any of the 4 other regional providers.
Oh, BTW, i can dial up AT&T customer support ANYTIME and speak to a REAL person on third ring, because if they don;t pick up, i will be switching to another provider AND carry my number with me (yeah portability).
Nothing scares customer support here more than a customer carrying the number and moving to another provider.
They tried lobbying parliment for laws against number portability, etc., but the politicians here refused and instead let the TRAI and supreme court decide it. They know if they support BIG telecoms against the common man, their next election would be a "bit troublesome to win".
And now TRAI had made it mandatory for telecoms to provide a SINGLE rate for all calls made anywhere within India. (No long distance, roaming charges). Telecoms here initially refused to do that "citing" costs... but then the supreme court beat the sh*t out of them and fined them heavily.
Nowadays most are running scared of TRAI and if they disobey it, the court comes down heavily.
The customer never had more better luck !
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I have a RAZR V3. It can do that, shoot photos (which I use frequently), email (which I use frequently), browse the web (which I don't use frequently anymore, but only because it is slow... faster web access I would use all of the time), play games, play various ringtones and music and shoot video (which eats too much RAM, but I would use if it didn't). I can loop my laptop through to Internet access as well, if I so please (and I would, were it faster).
All of those things that Krakow says he doesn't want, I do, and not only out of some consumerist need to buy the best of everything, because I genuinely use the features. If a phone with more features is thrown into my contract, and I'm stuck getting a contract anyway, I'm not sure that I would want to get the cheaper alternative... but that's just me.
there is simply no reason for a wireless provider to help you switch to another network.
A sense of ethics, maybe? Letting us use our phones as we want to?
And don't give me the standard cell-phone company BS about "subsidizing the cost of the phone." That's what the contracts are supposed to do. Thats why I have to sign up for 2 years to get the phone, and preventing me from taking it with me afterwards is just double-dipping.
The simple problem is that the US is just too big. Setting up a global cellular service over half a continent is a major challenge, which creates a huge barrier to entry. This means that it's easier for existing operators to corner the market, create an oligopoly and impose restrictions on the services offered to the customer.
This is in addition to the fact that the US did not choose a single 1st generation standard (GSM, CDMA, whatever), which fragmented the market even more.
In Europe, you have several middle-size countries in which local operators can develop, and then make agreements with each other to allow for international communications. It works, though it's more expensive (texting my firned in Hungary from the UK costs more than texting someone in the same country).
In the UK alone, I know of 7 significant nationwide mobile phone operators (0range, Vodaphone, O2, 3, Virgin, T-Mobile, Tesco), and I'm sure there are a few more (OK, at least two of these are "virtual" operators which piggyback on the network of another operator, but still, that's more competition).
Thomas-
Out of curiosity, did anyone actually take a look at the story?
A couple of the statements quoted in the Slashdot excerpt don't actually appear in the MSNBC article. While the article does point out that the phone is geared towards disadvantaged markets, there is no comment made that it's being kept out of the U.S. to pad the profit margins of American GSM carriers.
Is this Slashdot fearmongering, or was the MSNBC story edited to appease the sensitivities of the corporate master's advertisers?