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What's Keeping US Phones In the Stone Age?
knapper_tech writes "After seeing the iPhone introduction, I was totally confused by how much excitement it generated in the US. It offered no features I could see beyond my Casio W41CA's capabilities. I had a lot of apprehension towards the idea of a virtual keypad and the bare screen looked like a scratch magnet. Looks aren't enough. Finally, the price is ridiculous. The device is an order of magnitude more expensive than my now year-old Keitai even with a two-year contract. After returning to the US from Japan, I've come to realize the horrible truth behind iPhone's buzz. Over the year I was gone, US phones haven't really done anything. Providers push a minuscule lineup of uninspiring designs and then charge unbelievable prices for even basic things like text messages. I was greeted at every kiosk by more tired clamshells built to last until obsolescence, and money can't buy a replacement for my W41CA." Read on as this reader proposes and dismissed a number of possible explanations for the difference in cell-phone markets between the US and Japan. He concludes with, "It seems to me more like competition is non-existent and US providers are ramming yesteryear's designs down our throats while charging us an arm and a leg! Someone please give me some insight."
I finally broke down and got a $20 Virgin phone to at least get me connected until I get over my initial shock. In short, American phones suck, and iPhone is hopefully a wakeup call to US providers and customers. Why is the American phone situation so depressing?
Before I left for Japan about a year ago, I was using a Nokia 3160. It cost me $40 US and I had to sign a one year contract that Cingular later decided was a two-year contract. I was paying about $40 a month for service and had extra fees for SMS messages.
After I got to Kyoto, I quickly ended up at an AU shop and landed a Casio W41CA. It does email, music, pc web browsing, gps, fm radio, tv, phone-wallet, pictures (2megapixel), videos, calculator etc. I walked out of the store for less than ¥5000 (about $41) including activation fees, and I was only paying slightly over ¥4000 (about $33) per month. That included ¥3000 for a voice plan I rarely used and ¥1000 for effectively unlimited data (emails and internet).
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the costs facing American mobile providers can explain the huge technology and cost gap between the US and Japan. Why are we paying so much for such basic features?
At first, I thought maybe it was something to do with network infrastructure. The US is a huge land area and Japan is very tiny. However, Japan would have lots of towers because of the terrain. Imagine something like Colorado covered in metropolitan area. Also, even though places like rural New Mexico exist, nobody has an obligation to cover them, and from the look of coverage maps, no providers do. Operating a US network that reaches 40% of the nation's population requires nowhere near reaching 40% of the land area. The coverage explanation alone isn't enough.
Another possibility was the notion that because Americans keep their phones until they break, phone companies don't focus much on selling cutting edge phones and won't dare ship a spin-chassis to Oklahoma. However, with the contract life longer, the cost of the phone could be spread out over a longer period. If Americans like phones that are built to last and then let them last, the phones should be really cheap. From my perspective, they are ridiculously priced, so this argument also fails.
The next explanation I turned to is that people in the US tend to want winners. We like one ring to rule them all and one phone to establish all of what is good in phone fashion for the next three years. However, Motorola's sales are sagging as the population got tired of dime-a-dozen RAZR's and subsequent knockoffs. Apparently, we have more fashion sense or at least desire for individuality than to keep buying hundreds of millions of the same design. Arguing that the US market tends to gravitate to one phone and then champion it is not making Motorola money.
At last I started to wonder if it was because Americans buy less phones as a whole, making the cost of marketing as many different models as the Japanese prohibitive. However, with something like three times the population, the US should be more than enough market for all the glittery treasures of Akiba. What is the problem?
I'm out of leads at this point. It's not like the FCC is charging Cingular and Verizon billions of dollars per year and the costs are getting passed on to the consumer. Japanese don't have genetically superior cellphone taste. I remember that there was talk of how fierce mobile competition was and how it was hurting mobile providers' earnings. However, if Japanese companies can make money at those prices while selling those phones, what's the problem in the US? It seems to me more like competition is non-existent and US providers are ramming yesteryear's designs down our throats while charging us an arm and a leg! Someone please give me some insight.
I finally broke down and got a $20 Virgin phone to at least get me connected until I get over my initial shock. In short, American phones suck, and iPhone is hopefully a wakeup call to US providers and customers. Why is the American phone situation so depressing?
Before I left for Japan about a year ago, I was using a Nokia 3160. It cost me $40 US and I had to sign a one year contract that Cingular later decided was a two-year contract. I was paying about $40 a month for service and had extra fees for SMS messages.
After I got to Kyoto, I quickly ended up at an AU shop and landed a Casio W41CA. It does email, music, pc web browsing, gps, fm radio, tv, phone-wallet, pictures (2megapixel), videos, calculator etc. I walked out of the store for less than ¥5000 (about $41) including activation fees, and I was only paying slightly over ¥4000 (about $33) per month. That included ¥3000 for a voice plan I rarely used and ¥1000 for effectively unlimited data (emails and internet).
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the costs facing American mobile providers can explain the huge technology and cost gap between the US and Japan. Why are we paying so much for such basic features?
At first, I thought maybe it was something to do with network infrastructure. The US is a huge land area and Japan is very tiny. However, Japan would have lots of towers because of the terrain. Imagine something like Colorado covered in metropolitan area. Also, even though places like rural New Mexico exist, nobody has an obligation to cover them, and from the look of coverage maps, no providers do. Operating a US network that reaches 40% of the nation's population requires nowhere near reaching 40% of the land area. The coverage explanation alone isn't enough.
Another possibility was the notion that because Americans keep their phones until they break, phone companies don't focus much on selling cutting edge phones and won't dare ship a spin-chassis to Oklahoma. However, with the contract life longer, the cost of the phone could be spread out over a longer period. If Americans like phones that are built to last and then let them last, the phones should be really cheap. From my perspective, they are ridiculously priced, so this argument also fails.
The next explanation I turned to is that people in the US tend to want winners. We like one ring to rule them all and one phone to establish all of what is good in phone fashion for the next three years. However, Motorola's sales are sagging as the population got tired of dime-a-dozen RAZR's and subsequent knockoffs. Apparently, we have more fashion sense or at least desire for individuality than to keep buying hundreds of millions of the same design. Arguing that the US market tends to gravitate to one phone and then champion it is not making Motorola money.
At last I started to wonder if it was because Americans buy less phones as a whole, making the cost of marketing as many different models as the Japanese prohibitive. However, with something like three times the population, the US should be more than enough market for all the glittery treasures of Akiba. What is the problem?
I'm out of leads at this point. It's not like the FCC is charging Cingular and Verizon billions of dollars per year and the costs are getting passed on to the consumer. Japanese don't have genetically superior cellphone taste. I remember that there was talk of how fierce mobile competition was and how it was hurting mobile providers' earnings. However, if Japanese companies can make money at those prices while selling those phones, what's the problem in the US? It seems to me more like competition is non-existent and US providers are ramming yesteryear's designs down our throats while charging us an arm and a leg! Someone please give me some insight.
American's are more willing to pay for their techy gadgets. If the overpriced stuff here was perceived as that overpriced, no one would buy it, and the cell companies would be forced to sell their gadgets cheaper or with more features. I don't see this changing in the near future because we are accustomed to the pricing companies like Cingular and Sprint give us.
SmartBox
One word: copper
As long as some telco clings to legacy phone lines (paid for long ago), the stone age is all the US is going to get...
One interesting comparison someone pointed out to me is this: people think of Microsoft as a monopoly. But can you imagine them charging you for a "loading Windows sound" the way telecoms charge you for ringtones?
... when compared to a cell phone.
For the closedness and proprietarity of MS, they actually give you quite a bit of freedom with your machine
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
I don't know how true this is, but I've always assumed that the United States has a harder time upgrading to new technologies than places like Japan because of size and population density. In some place like Japan or Europe a cell phone tower will cover quite a few people, in Montana however.. not so much. This doesn't have anything to do with new cell phone designs, but more with prices for text messaging and such. Does anyone know how united states technology compares to places like Russia/Canada/China/Brazil/Australia?
I agree.
;)
Let me also say, I work as a programmer in Japan, and I work on mobile phones here. It sucks big time. Japan is not a model we want to adopt. But for better or worse, the main reason things are different in Japan is that cell phones are many (probably most) peoples primary portal to the internet. Hard as it is to believe coming from the states, but many people like (I guess) to browse the web, shop, and post to forums, using phones.
In the US, we have laptops
It's a good question.
I've always had high tech devices -- PDAs that were tethered to phones, micro laptops, etc. None of them worked well enough. I still had to spend time hitting a workstation, especially to download large files.
That all changed with the HTC -- EDGE is really fast, it is always connected, I can view HTML e-mails (get a lot of them) and I can proof PDFs (I own a not-for-profit print shop, too). I easily save 10 hours a week not having to hit a broadband connected workstation to do my work. Just 10 minutes here and 10 minutes there a day and it adds up quickly.
On top of all that, I can read all my RSS feeds from my phone (not while driving). So all those 5 minute or 10 minute "do nothing" time periods are spent actually doing something I'd normally try to do setting aside an hour at the end of the day (or the beginning).
This is possibly the most insightful comment in this entire thread. Everyone is so busy considering why American telcos "suck" that they're not stopping to actually carry through on the comparison made. For those of you in the dark, this is a Casio W41CA:
/ 2006/01/20/Casio-Mobile-Rocks-For-Movies/p1
http://www.trustedreviews.com/mobile-devices/news
An impressive phone? Certainly. It's on the order of something like the Motorola Q phone, but with a better form factor. At the end of the day, though, the Casio is still just a phone. The iPhone, however, is a complete hand computer and digital assistant that hits a sweet spot in the market's needs. The iPhone may appear to have a similar feature list, until you actually get down to the nitty gritty of it:
iPhone - Casio
128MB - 70MB
4-8 GB Hard Drive - 2GB SD Slot
Visual Voicemail - ???
Auto-Landscape Mode - Manual Swivel
Phone Numbers from Webpages - No
Integration with Movie/Music Service - No
Easy "Pinch" and "Spin" Navigation - Phone Keypad
Auto-Threading of SMS Conversations - Standard SMS Mailbox
On-Screen Conferencing options - Play on-hold games with the phone
Safari Browser with "Zoom on Element" Features - Opera Mini with imprecise Zooming
Rich email client - ???
Smooth Integration with Google Maps, Youtube, and Mac Widgets - Some functionality through Opera. No Flash
Basically, it comes down to usability. The iPhone is a modest step from a pure technology and feature-set perspective, but it's a quantum leap from a usability perspective. While the iPhone's design does not meet everyone's needs, it meets the largest cross-section of users on the market. i.e. The people who are not technophiles and have little to no idea how to use all the bizarre and excessive features of a smart-phone. For the most part, people just want a phone. The iPhone gives them a phone + a comprehensive feature set that easily performs other daily tasks that people do (e.g. check whether, look up maps, etc.) and handily replaces several other devices that they might carry around.
Folks around here tend to laugh at Taco's initial assessment of the iPod. ("No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.") Yet they turn around and make the exact same mistake with the iPhone. It's an interesting trend to behold.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Now, first I thought the poster was clueless, but then I saw some of the replies here, and jeez, guys, you're usually sharper than this.
:-)
I'm European, but I'm currently living in the US (San Francisco) and I've also lived in Japan for six months. Let me dispel some myths for you.
First, this is not a new phenomenon, these outdated cell-phones in the US. When I first came here in 2000, people looked at my phone (an Ericsson T28 World) like it was from outer space. Tiny, and with a standby time that lasted for two days. I stayed at a hostel the first few weeks, and the other room-mate there with a cell was amazed that I didn't need to recharge my phone every night... In general, the phones on sale in the US are two years behind Europe.
Second, the cell phone market in the US and Japan is very different from the one in Europe. In Japan and the US there are several different technologies used, in Europe it's all GSM, mandated by law. This means that in Europe you can almost always bring your phone from one provider to the next - all you need to do is change the little sim-card inside the phone. This is much harder, and in many cases impossible, in the US and Japan.
Third, in Japan, people have horrendously long commutes on public transport systems. This is why internet on tiny phone displays took off first there. Many people have 12-hour work days (or, at least, 12 hours away from home) - there isn't really time to sit down at a desktop computer and browse for fun in the evening. Americans, in contrast, commute by car. Maybe it's not such a hot idea to be reading your emails or checking out the latest slashdot story there...
Fourth, just a side comment - I've seen several people here comment that "Europe is more densely populated, that's why cell phone coverage is better". To this I say: BS. Sweden or Finland are two of the least densely populated countries in Europe, way less populated than California, and still the cell phones are a couple years ahead of whats available here.
Hope that helps.
Try Canada... we probably won't even GET the iPhone up here, because what's the point when unlimited data doesn't even exist anymore. I think the top end data plan I saw was $200 a MONTH for 500 megs. Basic plans are about 4 meg's a month, and $12 per meg on top of that. I have a grandfathered, $50 a month for unlimited painfully slow GPRS, and even got someone asking to buy my account for quite a bit of $ because of it. Unless your rich or in an Enterprise organization there's no reason to have a smartphone up here with data capabilities. Oh and we get the same phones as the US, usually several months after the fact. As bad as the plans may be in the US compared to the rest of the world, it's still leaps and bounds beyond what we get.
Or go to India - with the state owned BSNL you pay -
$0.025 per minute for anywhere in India
$0.0005 per minute between BSNL subscribers
$.125 per minute for calls to US from India
US cell phone industry is still in dark ages.
I know why I want OCR on the phone.
I want to snap a picture of a business card and have it OCR'd and added as a vcard in my phone's phonebook, and when it syncs with the computer, it will be in Address Book. I can discard the stacks of business cards and not carry a goofy card scanner to conventions.
I want to be able to photograph receipts and OCR them, have them compile into an expense report and email them, so that I don't have to fool with losing a receipt or leaving it off a report.
Sure, I have manual ways of addressing both problems currently, but devices are meant to make my life easier and geekier. A 2 megapixel camera is sufficient for OCR. These things should be possible.