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]
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-