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."
Aside from this, he makes a great point about how the U.S. phone market is too controlled by a tiny handful of providers. 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!
It seems as though GSM is a step in the right direction because T-Mobile, Cingular, and ATT branded phones are basically interchangeable. Even so, the Europeans and Japanese always seem to have much cooler phones, and the options in the U.S. are just so limited.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
The phone is targeted for emerging markets, where people don't like to tie themselves into monthly contracts,
Am I wrong, or do they mean yearly contracts?
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
“IMAGINE a magical device that could boost entrepreneurship and economic activity, provide an alternative to bad roads and unreliable postal services, widen farmers’ access to markets, and allow swift and secure transfers of money. Now stop imagining: the device in question is the mobile phone.”
“It is increasingly clear that, when it comes to bridging the ‘digital divide’ between rich and poor, the mobile phone, not the personal computer, has the most potential.”
--
Mobile phones and development
Calling an end to poverty
Jul 7th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Mobile-phone firms have found a profitable way to help the poor help themselves
[Image] (Still Pictures)
ALL eyes are on what governments can do to end poverty, with aid, debt relief and trade top of the agenda at this week’s G8 summit. But what about the role that business can play--and, in particular, technology firms? It is increasingly clear that, when it comes to bridging the “digital divide” between rich and poor, the mobile phone, not the personal computer, has the most potential. “Emerging markets will be wireless-centric, not PC-centric,” says C. K. Prahalad, a management scholar and author of “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”, a book that highlights the collective purchasing power of the world’s 4 billion poorest people and urges firms to try to profit from it.
Mobile phones have become indispensable in the rich world. But they are even more useful in the developing world, where the availability of other forms of communication--roads, postal systems or fixed-line phones--is often limited. Phones let fishermen and farmers check prices in different markets before selling produce, make it easier for people to find work, allow quick and easy transfers of funds and boost entrepreneurship. Phones can be shared by a village. Pre-paid calling plans reduce the need for a bank account or credit check. A recent study by London Business School found that, in a typical developing country, a rise of ten mobile phones per 100 people boosts GDP growth by 0.6 percentage points. Mobile phones are, in short, a classic example of technology that helps people help themselves.
But despite rapid subscriber growth in much of the developing world, only a small proportion of people--around 5% in both India and sub-Saharan Africa--have their own mobile phones. Why? The price of handsets is the “biggest obstacle” to broader adoption, says Alan Knott-Craig, boss of Vodacom, which runs networks in five African countries. Azmi Mikati of Investcom, which runs networks in Africa and the Middle East, estimates that the number of users would double in those markets if the cheapest handset cost $30 instead of $60.
Ringing the changes
Handset-makers earn most of their profits from fancy phones sold to consumers in rich countries, where on average a handset costs around $200 (before operator subsidies). But as markets have become saturated in the rich world, manufacturers have started to realise that their future growth depends on catering to the needs of developing nations. As a result, they have been working with operators to develop new extremely cheap handsets and to boost adoption in the poor world.
Several operators from developing countries teamed up earlier this year under the auspices of the GSM Association, which promotes the use of GSM, the world’s dominant mobile-phone standard. They invited the handset-makers to bid for a contract to supply up to 6m handsets for less than $40 each. The contract was won by Motorola. Delivery of handsets began in April. The low cost is not due to cross-subsidy from high-margin handsets or “corporate social responsibility” funding, insists David Taylor of Motorol
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..
Indeed, what an amazing and insightful "news" story. It's not because of cell phone technology that cell phones are such a drag in the US, it's because of the cell phone "service" providers. Who would have thought.
You probably shouldn't click this.
I'm one of the people mentioned that don't like to tie myself into monthly contracts. The fact that a phone will make less profit for the phone companies should not make a difference as to whether it is sold here. I'm sure there are many people who just want a phone to be a phone.
/., the Register, and a few more online news sources before the mainstream media realizes they can't ignore it much longer and starts to cover the story (being careful of course to not step on the toes of any of their advertisers), getting the (usually watered-down) message out to the unwashed.
Crappy (for us, the 'consumers') corporate decisions like this happen every day, and we're going to need to speak up sooner or later if we want anything to change.
Right now, it takes a story on
These situations seem to require getting to that point before the companies will 'take a look at' their actions, Sony's DRM CD being the latest example. Your customers don't know what a rootkit is? They have a better idea now.
Making noise about these things is making a difference, however small it may be.
If down is up and right is left, that is the best phone in the world. Or at least the best looking.
Ugly, ugly phone. Holy cow.
You want to know why nice phones don't come to the US? It's because people want to hang onto these things until the last circuit burns out and they can't hear the person on the other end because the flames shooting out of the earpiece are too hot. Then they try to extend the life on the phones by only making calls while holding their head in a tank of water. When the phone finally stops making calls, the pry the fuckers open and try to build a morse code/edgar allen poe tap tap tapping machine. When the battery decays and starts dripping acid all over everything, the phone owner grabs a blanket and uses the device to send smoke signals.
The rate of turnover in devices is not high enough to justify importing constantly updated models.
from the end... "The color model, the C155, is available in the United States, sold by the prepaid wireless company TracFone online and through retail outlets such as Wal-Mart. For $29.98, you get the phone and the right to buy pay-as-you-go phone services. Telefonica MoviStar sells the C116 phone in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries."
me jumping with kites I make...
The idea is that people interested in having a simple phone want just that - a simple phone.
Monochrome display lengthens the battery life, colour screen shortens it. Simple.
I use a Palm Tungsten T PDA and wanted a basic bluetooth GSM phone that I could use to connect the Palm to the Internet. The best I found -- actually, the only basic phone I found -- was the Nokia 6310i. Basic black and white screen, basic keyboard, somewhat large compared to other phones, but IT WORKS. My 6310i is now over 3 years old and I've seen nothing on the Canadian market that looks like it. I have a great Palm PDA - why would I want a $500 colour phone discounted to $99 with a 3 year contract?
Half the articles seem to be trolls in and of themselves.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
Some people shouldn't be given complicated phones, like my parents as an example.
It's complete and utter feature overkill for them. They don't play the games, don't change the ringtones & don't know how to use anything besides the address book.
This phone would be perfect for my parents
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
and isn't it great the way the profit motive works? There's tons of crap like this in the PC world. You can't buy an inkjet with easily (and properly) refillable cartridges, and the American counterparts print half as many pages before dying. There's little or no innovation in midrage ($100-$200) soundcards since too much too fast might kill the market for next years upgrades. And noone wants to sell you a decent video card for less than $200 dollars ever since 3dfx bought the farm. I'm sure you could find this crap going on outside the technology sector ( I hear it's a major problem in the drug industry ). I say get the gov't involved in combating this. Sure they'll muck things up pretty bad, but the way I see it the corps are screwing us all so bad hamstringing them a little couldn't hurt. Christ, at least put a stop the the landfill expanding nightmare that is inkjet printers.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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]
Personally, I want to tell Ma'Bell to take her phone and shove it where the sone don't shine. Give me something that I can hack and create my own programs on instead of this bubblegum mainstream crap anyday!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
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.
The wireless operators won't tell you this - for obvious reasons - but you're absolutely NOT required to purchase your phone from them. The bottom line is that you can aquire an unlocked, factory-direct phone from places like eXpansys. After that, simply call the carrier to do an ESN swap or in the case of GSM place the SIM in the new phone.
The trick, of course, is knowing the technology your carrier supports. I don't expect that to be an issue for this crowd.
That was actually the next paragraph.
What's annoying is that it is getting impossible to find a decent PHONE. I don't want a camera, I don't want a web access device, I don't want an MP3 player. What I do want is a SMALL PHONE. It seems like any basic phone without gimmicks is three times the size of a RAZR, which makes no sense whatsoever.
All it does is cause headaches for those of us who work in secure environments and have to choose between carrying a walkie-talkie in our pocket looking like we have a tumor, or else we have to leave our compact phone at the security desk. Does ANYONE make a tiny clamshell phone that just, you know, makes phone calls and receives them?
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I put off getting a cell phone until December 2004 because I didn't feel I needed one. I still don't use it that often.
The salesman seemed confused by the fact that I didn't want a camera phone, and having a speakerphone was more important. If I was going to get a new phone today, I'd want a video phone even less. I want a phone, just a phone, and nothing but a phone (so help me $DIETY), and I'm sure I'm not alone, even in the U.S.
Obviously, the phone carriers don't care that people like me exist in the U.S.
Most people I know use Internet based carriers, where all interaction with the carrier is through a web page. You can use any phone with their service. There is no subscription, you have an account where you can add money as you like, and you can phone as long as there is money on the account. They are, by far, the cheapest carriers, and has won "best service" awards multiple times.
Cash cards are also popular, especially among children. You buy a card, enter a number on the card on your phone, and can not talk for the amount of money the card costed. No subscription or Internet connection required, but they are somewhat expensive.
There are also subscription based sevices. They have very complex price structures, mostly to make their price impossible to compare with the alternatives. The subscription based services are usually sold with a phone that is bound to the carrier in question for six months. After the six months, the carrier is legally bound to tell you how to unlock it. You can also unlock it for US$ 15 at small shops that are everywhere. This is quite legal, but you still have to pay 6 month subscription fee. Often the rebate you get is higher than the price of six month subscription.
And this is not a developing market. It is a mature market that has benefitted from regulation.
One word, virginmobile. They seem to be the least evil of all cell phone companies... especially if you hardly use your phone (the standard plan will suck you dry if you do talk alot). I love it, I don't need to use my minutes every month, they never expire (assuming i buy $15 of airtime every 3 months, which is automatically billed anyway).
Disclaimer: I don't work for or have any affiliation with virgin mobile, just a happy customer.
The goal of computer science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
I have a Virgin phone with a pay as you go plan that in theory could be as low as $15 every three months - naturally it's not quite that low but probably only $30 every three months.
All I would ask for in addition to that plan is a Bluetooth phone and some kind of data plan. Heck, it could cost ten cents a minute for data access and that would be totally fine, just enough to fetch and send email while out and about.
I also do not need color screen or a camera. I just what a phone to bring me data connectivity... I may look into getting the phone you mentioned even though I'd have to pay a lot more for a plan to support it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
Ok, so that's cool that now people notice the bad hardware available here. Now let's hope it'll move on to the next stage: the SHITTY SERVICES! Hell, why would I have to pay to RECEIVE a phone call? In every other country on the globe you pay only when you call! Might be a tad more expensive, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper in the long run. The US unfortunately has a history of not cracking down on monopolies when it should, and the limitations for cell phone service here are just insane. That's why I vote with my wallet: I refuse to get a cellphone. It's so simple really. Just abandon cell phones. It'll probably result in a hell of a lot less traffic accidents anyway! And not paying the companies will force them to re-evaluate what they're thinking.
My $0.02 worth of opinion.
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
OT, but always near the topic in this pedantic place. Your sig has been informative to me. I hate to feed grammar trolls, but up until now I have always used its and it's backwards. I thought I knew the rule and I was wrong. I looked it up, and I have been enlightened. It's still a stupid rule, and I don't agree with it, but at least I know the convention now. Thanks for making me feel stupid. On a completely unrelated side note, the United States is probably too geographically large and sparsely populated in great expanses of land for a small mobile carrier to compete on infrastructure with the big boys. We have a well entrenched oligopoly as any mobile phone customer support representative will let you know. First hand experience has shown me that they really don't care if the customers feel they are treated unfairly. Where else are they going to get a mobile phone without a 2 year contract? I quote: "Go ahead and look. You'll be back." As long as there are Americans willing to pay $2.99 per ringtone, we will never see a cheap mobile telephone for the masses.
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
Au contraire, the phone companies understand their customers all too well! You are just not their average customer. Their target demographic is a twenty-something (or even a teenie) who's far more interested in flash and glam than in solid construction, long-lasting performance, and a basic feature set. Nor does s/he want to keep that phone for more than a year before replacing it with the next new thing either. The phone companies know this, so that's who they pander to -- not to you, my stolid, counter-current swimming, engineer friend.
You are not alone
licet differant, aequabitur
Capitalism is neat. It gives consumers choice.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In the US you have to *PAY* to *RECEIVE* mobile phone calls!
... crazy.
That's just
I hear that the receiver of an SMS has to pay to receive text messages too - is this true?
"I couldn't wait to slip my SIM card inside and see what it could do. "
;-)
Filth! Nothing but poisonous fuel for a twisted mind.
+del.icio.us ++dugg
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
It isn't, simply. Thing is real pure capitalism is just as utopian as pure communism (only more evil in its nature, weaker ones get destroyed). The problem is these are economy systems and some people get blindfolded when talking which one is good and which one is evil, while forgetting the underlying political systems - basically totalitarism and democracy.
Communism by all means is socially more advanced, more human-friendly and so on, capitalism is the law of the jungle, kill or get killed. The problem is that politics trumps economy and totalitarian communism is worse than democratic capitalism. Of course both are better than totalitarian capitalism ('banana republics') and we're yet to see a country with real democratic communism to happen. (Sweden and Switzerland are pretty close though.)
Now all the systems are suspectible to corruption. The problem with communism is that it's very vulnerable in that matter. Humans by nature are lazy thieves, so communism without safeguards against that is doomed to fail, and the safeguards usually mean totalitarism, making it a hell to live in. Communism gets corrupted by semi-totalitarian powers like huge monopoles. Price fixing, secret arguments, cutting the customers off cheaper and better goods, that's all corruption of capitalist system. The problem at hand though is, that while mostly everyone saw how bad is the corruption of communism in Eastern Bloc (blaming it on ideas of communism though, not on totalitarian rule), nobody seems to see the depth of corruption of the market and the failure of democracy in the US. Instead of really ELECTING your leader, you're given a choice between two almost equal evils, you can choose to shoot your left or right foot, or if you don't vote, leave the shooting of your feet to someone else. The powers elected do nothing to fix the current corruption of market (because it profits them) and maintain the status quo, handing the power to each other, mock-fighting and giving the masses ilusion of choice.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
When i wanted a second phone other than my blackberry, I chose this one. Great design!
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?
Last winter I bought Siemens S66 and the cheapest $29.99 local plan from Cingular. I had to go to Europe for summer and wanted to use the phone there. The phone was advertised as business class tri-band GSM phone that would work worldwide. That's why I bought it since I thought I would use it while I am in Europe. When I got to Europe and tried to use SIM card from another carrier the phone would not take it and was asking for a unlock code. I e-mailed Cingular and asked for the code. They e-mailed me the unlock code - it didn't work. I e-mailed them again telling the code did not work. Cingular told me that the code would not work unless I upgrade to another (more expensive) plan. I didn't want to do that since the whole point was to use it with European SIM since their rates were much cheaper. The roaming feature worked though, but Cingular international rates are ridiculous!
So, I went to the guys who were "specialists" in unlocking phones from other countries. They checked the serial number on the phone (under the battery) and immediately told me that my phone (Siemens S66) could not be unlocked since it was made for U.S. market; the same European phone is Siemens S65, not S66.
My solution was to buy a cheap phone and use it with SIM card from European carrier since I did not have to sign any contracts. Also, it was cheaper than upgrading my Cingular plan in order to be able to use my Cingular phone with European SIM card.
Right now I use a Kyocera SE44 slider. Tiny phone, tiny screen. Works great, though. The buttons are too small for my fat fingers and the screen is getting a little hard for my presbyopic eyes to see, but it works until the current contract's up.
;-)
;-)
But - I'm closer to 50 than 40 (or even 45) and have been a professional geek most of my adult life. At this point in my life I want *simple* technology that works.
Last May I kicked my cable TV provider to the curb and got a satellite dish. Got two TVs and two computers wired up for the price I was paying coughcomcastcough for a a two-tv digital cable setup (had analog-only to the computers). Plus, I got this really cool DVR
That same month I told the local phone company to take a hike, ported our home number to the spousal unit's cell and got a cell phone for myself. Since only about ten people have the number to my phone, interruptions have decreased significantly.
Last fall when my mother-in-law's laptop died (second HD failure) I took her down to the Apple store and she bought an iMac. She's almost 80 years old and can surf the web, do email and whatever alse she needs to do with a minimum of fuss. Once I got the iMac connected to her wireless network she *never* called me again for technical support. I'm so impressed I'm getting ready to buy an iMac for me. Bye Bye, Microsoft
But I digress.
As I continue to try to simplify my life (which is what technology's supposed to do, ain't it?) all I want is a phone that *makes phone calls*, has an address book that I can synchronize with my computer and doesn't play games, MP3s, support polyphonic ringtones, have a camera (and especially not a flash - I own a digital camera, honest) and so on.
Of course, if you looked up 'curmudgeon' in the dictionary you'd see my picture, but the older I get the *less* impressed I am with devices that can do everything.
But can't do any of them well. Can I have just a phone, please?
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
I used to have a regular phone and a regular Verizon contract. It was my first mobile phone.
What I found out during the 2 year contract was that I barely use a mobile. The coverage at my house stinks bad enough that I can't drop my landline anyway.
Now I have a Virgin Mobile phone. The phone cost something like $20, and I only need to pump $5/month into it which buys $0.25/min time (reduces to $0.10/min after 10 minutes). Even at that, my balance creeps up every month; I don't even use $5/month.
I now use that info when someone tries to sell me a mobile plan with hundreds of minutes/month; over the last 3 years, my average use has been about 8 minutes per month.
However, I do realize that the market for users like me is very small; if it weren't for teenagers and poor people to sell to, these services wouldn't exist at all for those of us who could afford a bigger phone & contract but don't really want it.
I don't have a monthly plan because I outlasted their two year contract, then refused any new one. Feels great.
Just for the fun: I use US Cellular. I don't want a GPS phone, so I never upgrade the device. However, they sent me a letter about a month back telling me that I *had* to buy a new GPS-enabled phone 'cause the guvmint said so. And I was offered a new, discounted phone (tiny print: new 2-year contract). And here's the kicker: they intended to -perhaps- charge me a "substantial" penalty fee every month if I didn't buy myself a guvmint-sanctioned tracking device.
I called 'em up, and the rep apologized and said policy had changed since the letter went out.
Well, that was interesting. But I really don't want a tracking device on me at all times. I'd hate to give up the cell phone. And all the pay phones seemed to have disappeared.