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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.
But that aside, just comparing the two devices regardless oft heir availability, iPhone is the clear winner.
How about the touchscreen? The Casio doesn't have one, let alone a multi-touch. Its exterior is instead covered with buttons of varying types, which most of us have grown to dislike.
Your phone runs Opera Mini. iPhone runs full blown Safari. It has a shell. Third party apps will soon be hitting the web in droves.
And lets not talk about the UI. Apple did this one, show me anyone who can do them better.
And iTunes support, you do not have that. The Casio can't play anything from the already large library of iTunes media that many of us already have. Call it vendor lock in if you want, we don't really care, we just want to enjoy our media.
iPhone is smaller than the Casio. It has built in WiFi. It has been well demonstrated by now that the glass does not scratch and despite the fact that you people seem to feel like it should it remains that it does not. So we're expected to read and trust the rest of your analysis of the phone market, when you can't even deliver a fair assessment of two handsets?
Go away troll.
yea if you unlock your phone yourself chances are that it will brick itself.. and bam your phone is in the stone age !
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
No two ways about it. Especially the old-school players like VZW, who have that MaBell attitude.
circa75.com
Unless I'm much mistaken they didn't even have a fixed phone infrastructure in the Stone Age, let along Cell Phones.
Kids these days!
Zzzzzzzzzzz..........
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Q: What's Keeping US Phones In the Stone Age?
A: State of the "Free Market" in the USA
Book the first flight back to Japan, stay there, and buy whatever you want.
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...
You see, foreigner, in America, innovation costs money. In American society, profit is the bottom line and the only winner is the company. If the company can change the lineup just enough to keep the sheeple fooled into buying in to slightly different products, the CEO gets a nice, fat bonus. (The same goes for Apple, btw.)
And here I thought everyone was well-versed on the sad state of corporate America.
A thinly veiled attack on the iPhone along with a simplistic look at the cell phone market to try and wrapper the whole thing. Atrocious.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I buy all my phones from Australia or Hong Kong -- unlocked and ready to roll. I currently run the HTC Trinity with a cooked WM6 rom, and I love it. $600 from Hong Kong.
My friends can't believe I shelled out $600 for a phone I'll use for a year. But the phone saves me between 10 and 15 hours a week (additional productivity) and I do a vast majority of my web browsing, blogging, and e-mailing from it. Why did I pick it? All the features I want, with nothing locked out.
Why do manufacturers lock phones and reduce features? Because consumers in America want free or cheap phones with long contracts. It's ridiculous. I haven't had a T-Mobile contract for years -- but we have 12 phones on my corporate account (maybe more, not sure). All our phones are imports with the features that are important to us.
All my friends are locked into contracts and have NO negotiating ability. If they're co-op together (cheap LLC, let's say) they could get a better corporate rate, and even negotiate it (T-Mobile Corporate Customer Care/Retention is really fantastic) based on their needs. Instead, they want a "free" $250 phone, and they pay 10c for text messages over a specific number. Idiotic.
People have to realize that "free" is not free, and it is usually wiser to just pay for a great phone -- and save on your monthly bill -- than it is to do what they're currently doing.
The market is providing exactly the crappy service, and pricing, and hardware, that people want.
Try moving to Canada!
To answer your question, US consumers are keeping phones in the "stone age." The *vast* majority of US cell phone users buy the phones and use them as - get this - phones . Sure, teens love to text and techies love wireless... but most people use cell phones for their original, intended purpose. Manufacturers have seen this and responded accordingly.
"All the cool stuff is made in Japan." Part of what you're seeing is not how "crappy" the American system is, but how awesome service is in say, Tokyo in particular. You can see some pretty incredible technology in San Francisco too, stuff that will never ever get to say, Mechanicsburg Ohio. US providers are tasked with nationwide competition and widely varying levels of tech adaptation. We have free wi-fi all over at the nearby shopping mall, but if you head out to farm country, you can't even get regular radio.
stuff |
clicky
because cellphones are meant to make calls, not be this confusing multi-use minicomputer uber-device people want it to be. Jamming too many functions in a small device makes it much less useful than if you just give it some core functionality (phone + directory), and leave other functionality to other specialty devices.
People's obsession with fancy-ass gadgets only serves one purpose: to have a bigger tech-penis than their friends. Get over yourselves.
Since Slashdot mods equate speaking the fucking truth as "trollish", I'm not going to damage my karma, if you wonder why this post is AC.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=ip hone
Great example of the reasons why the iPhone sucks
Up here we would be only too happy to get US cell phone rates.
Get her to add you as a friend.....you get to see milfy bewbs!!!!
s er.viewprofile&friendID=108370887
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=u
It worked for me, Donny Most!@!!!~`~!
It offered no features I could see beyond my Casio W41CA's capabilities.
.txt and .gif files like I've been able to do for 10 years already."
You're making the mistake of counting features, ignoring *how* they're used. I remember back in the early 1990s, when this new world wide web thing popped up. Plenty of comments then from people who couldn't see the forest for the trees, that were much like yours - "The world wide web offers no features I could see beyond downloading
Sure, the web can be seen as just text and image files, but oh boy... did the presentation and access difference ever change the world. How things work really is important.
The same thing happens with MP3 players: The not iPod DAPs we get here are generally last years tired old garbage compared with the rest of the world. And that's without the vendor lock-in as an explanation.
I don't know, but 90% of the functions you would consider necessary to make a 'stone age' phone modern, I don't want. All I want is a basic phone, enough buttons to dial and end a call with good sound quality. That's it. Call me Neanderthal, but I like my cell phones to make phone calls, my coffee pots to make coffee, and my women to ... ;-)
Greed.
Tag this story: askslashdotobviousquestions
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
I think one of the problems with the US market is the way that it was initially set up. When cell phones started breaking out into mainstream use, service providers such as Sprint, AT&T, the Bell's, all had contracts with specific cell phone manufacturers such as LG, Samsung, Motorola. Alot of phones are sold exclusively by one provider and are not available with another service. In asia, this is usually not the case. Many phones use a SIM card (similar to cingular), which really allows the phone to be connected to a network. The phones are sold separately and are not associated with only one service provider. Thus, you can use almost any cell phone with any provider. In this way, it makes the cell phone manufacturers compete with the design and functionality of their new phones, and for service providers to compete only with their quality and cost of connection service. You can buy a phone separately and choose any service provider. If you choose to leave that provider, you can keep your phone and go to another service provider. it's that simple. In America, if you really want that specific certain phone, you have to buy it from Verizon or other. In the same way, you have to buy a NEW phone if you decide to switch providers. The fact that American companies do not do this, is an injustice to the american people. For America to claim to be the archetypical capitalistic economy yet still stifle innovation for the accrueing of profit is something we shouldn't stand for. I doubt anyone here is happy with their level of service.
The cell companies in the US are near monopolies. Getting a phone without a contract is extremely expensive. Contracts lock you in to a provider for two years, and the cost of switching is extremely high. Since the cell companies only allow you to use certain phones on their network, and since many of them use incompatible networks, there is effectively no competition.
It's the same reason that cable TV is so expensive. Lack of real competition. Sure, you can choose Direct TV instead, but they don't have to price themselves substantially lower than the competition.
I'm going to check with my cronies in major corporations and see if this is actually a problem. If so, I think we have things called "regulatory bodies" we could use to promote consumer interests. I haven't actually done that before, but I believe it's possible. I think that's why Exxon and AT&T are so small and weak, because prior administrations broke them up to help consumers.
Come to think of it, I see my role as trying to help these boys get back on their feet after too much regulation. So how about we just ask them to give you a better phone at a lower price? It'll take time, so get back to me in 18 months or so if you're still feelin' the pain.
- George
I use an N91 and I'm visiting in the US. Even call rates are so expensive! And people stop me on the street to check out my phone, which, while it's high-end, is normal enough in BANGLADESH that it doesn't get this kind of attention.
... are reliable. Not to mention also cheap and familar.
Complex phones are hard to use, are unreliable, and expensive.
Is this realy that difficult to understand?
Pay more for less...wait, is this an article about the pharmaceutical industry in the U.S. vs. everywhere else in disguise?
The reason why the US is so far behind is because the majority of the populace doesn't realize there are better cheaper alternatives. The major cell phone carriers want to keep the artificially high service prices, because well, people are paying for it now, why change it? They also did put out a ton of capital to build the networks. Plus, I really believe the leaders of these companies realize that change is coming in the next 5-10 years. Major change. Change that could completely destroy their business plan. So why not (much like oil), try and pinch as much as they can out of it? As for cell phone manufacturers, they rely primarily on the service providers to move their product. So, they're in a tough situation. Do they try and push a phone that could hurt their number 1 sales person? In the end, we will get cheaper phones with more features. But not until we get pinched for every penny we can be pinched for.
Since when is this a bad thing? I'd rather not be forced into buying a new phone constantly, simply because it broke.
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 think it's largely a matter of area covered. When you look at the cells for a high-speed network in Japan, they are very close together so that wherever you are, you're fairly close to at least one station. Covering all of Japan probably costs around the same it would cost to do Florida. I'm betting you'd have a LOT more Japanese customers taking advantage of this since i-Mode has soundly stomped WAP for usability and billing plans... from the beginning of time, and you can do more with it.
So we keep getting cheap stone-age phones because most people don't even want the extra junk they pile in to North American phones NOW, much less getting 10x as much, and because of that, it would not be worthwhile to heap billions into upgrading the country's infrastructure (also quite hard when we have so many carriers and not just mainly DoCoMo / KDDI) just for a network that would probably be obsolete in 5 years.
It sucks... I want a DoCoMo phone too... but I can see why this is not the place to do it - at least with the current Japanese technology. Now if we get more phones that can take advantage of high-speed internet over wi-fi, that would level the playing field a certain amount (even if our residential high-speed connections are pretty slow too...)
Quote from the article:
It seems to me more like competition is non-existent...
If this doesn't slap you across the face... well... DUH.
Competition in mobile service is a joke. Phones are merely marked up so they can then be marked down "with 2 year service contract!" Plans several years ago were dropping because all the providers were trying to hold onto their customers and provide good service, but then they all started merging and stifling competition and it's been stagnant for the past few years and it seems like service isn't continuing to improve any more. I used to have less coverage but reliable calls in 2001-2002, now I have more coverage, but more "dead spots" and "dropped calls."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Its very well possible competition is stifled by agreements amongst vendors. In the European Union these kind of agreements, aimed at getting the maximum money out of a market that has habituated to a certain price level, have been found in almost every industry. As your country recently overturned the law preventing mandatory minimum pricing , effectivley saying you'll always pay for store overhead even if there is no store, you can be sure you'll be ripped off.
The poor comparison of the US vs rest of world may be a result of failure to adopt GSM and/or to lock GSM phones to a single carrier.
In the non-locked GSM model used by most of the rest of the world (in particular Europe & Japan) the phone manufacturers are competing just based on features/cost and the carriers can only differentite themselves based on pricing since the phones are portable across carriers. Decoupling of phone choice and carrier choice, and phone manufacturer and carrier, creates much more competition than the US model where carriers try to limit customer choice in order to maximize revenue (e.g. disable phone features such as ring tone upload or photo download to force customer to pay to do things via their networks that the phone itself would let you do for free).
My brother-in-law in India bought two shares of some TATA company for 750Rs per share. Imagine! buying 2 shares! The trade commission was 15 Rs or 33 cents USA. It was high as a percentage 1% of the value of the trade. I would not trade at 1% cost per trade, no sensible person would. So I am sure Indian don't trade as much as the Americans. But how can a company execute a trade and make a profit at 33 cents a trade? It is insane. In India, incoming cell phone calls are free. I think SMS is free. I got 180 minutes of talk time for some 7.5$, no contracts, no other fees. Millions of Indians use their phones only to receive calls, and so dont pay a dime as fees. Why is it so damned expensive in USA. Definitely because of lack of competition. There is no other explanation.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
... that they still have way to go before providing a reliable basic service. Making or receiving calls with a cell phone still is a hit and miss business.
Enough said.
1) Two major players: Rogers (a.k.a Robbers) and Bell (a.k.a Dull)
2) Other smaller players with even worse service (Virgin, Fido, Telus etc.)
3) Cannot get a phone without a contract (pay as you go is 15 cents-25 cents per call for the first minute and then a little lower for the next used time)
4) Extra charges for receiving and sending SMS, as well as for having 911 and voice mail
5) Incoming call charges (I Wish I could find a Bell or Rogers executive, put him on a plane, and take him Pakistan where even the worst Telco does not charge for incoming calls, and then shoot him!)
Bottom line: Customer gouging and hardly any choice
That's mobile phone companies for you. There are only a few companies in the market who are involved in a hegemonic price-fixing cartel controlled by the use of proprietary protocols. This means they think they can get away with charging you anything.
I just looked at the prices for these things and was shocked. I just bought a new Sharp Zaurus SL-C3200 palmtop (which is a proper computer running on Linux with various totally FLOSS OSs available, 6" x 4", 6GB HDD, 416 MHz Intel XScale CPU, 64 MB RAM, 128 MB Flash ROM, USB host and client, IrDACF & SD slots for memory and WiFi and few hours of heavy use on battery life) for 256 GBP, which looks like it is quite a bit cheaper than the iPhone is going for in the US if I have my conversion right.
I just have a Nokia 1100 for a phone, which I've had for several years. It's very cheap, small and reliable, and the battery lasts, it can be thrown about and is very easy to use. What more do you need from a ''phone''. And these phone/PDA hybrids aren't proper PDAs and often aren't very easy-to-use phones either.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
I don't know if slashdot realizes this, but there's a schizm between what the OP apparently wants and the "but I just want a phone" crowd.
Plus I don't really see what the OP wants that's really going to improve the phone experience that we don't already have. I suppose if I was addicted to technology? A neverending iteration and upgrade cycle would be great, but I'm not.
Most Americans = stupid and don't understand anything more complicated than making calls, therefore there is no market for anything 'fancy'.
So stupid in fact they tolerate paying to receive calls. That still cracks me up every time.
Sheesh, I realize the fanboyism is too much but posts like this are just outrageous. Do you people realize that the SLVR and the RAZR were $300+ unless you signed a contract? You guys keep bitching at the iPhone cost but never acknowledge how much MORE you get. Take the Casio W41CA.... 70 MG versus 4 GB. 2.6 inch screen 200x400 vs the iPhone's 3.5inch 340x480... I could go on, but if you guys want to ignore the facts, there's no helping you.
Where the telephone companies are just small groups of the Skull and Bones Order.
Just look at the state of the art in design and engineering of automobiles in the States. If a country tolerates this kind of automotive engineering why would it not tolerate the anachronistic cell phone design that you write about? When it comes to design aesthetics and advanced features, culture and education are two important factors to consider. I am not saying that Americans are not cultured or educated. But it would be unfair to compare the culture and education of Japan or Europe (which spans thousands of years) with that of a very young country such as the States. Add to that the cultural isolationism of the US from most thing European and Japanese (save their cars) and you can begin to see the roots of apprehension when it comes to advanced designs. That Apple managed to maintain an innovative presence in the US market all these years is a miracle. Persistence and consistency pay off, though, so now Apple begins to reap the benefits of its commitment to good and aesthetically advanced engineering. It just takes time.
I was in Japan for about a month last summer and I actually got a chance to speak with some higherups at a few electronics companies about the mobile phone market in Japan, and Europe, actually. A few of the big driving forces for the adoption of better phones in Japan specifically are as follows:
Business: low-cost (to the companies) availability and quality of service: Japan is small, compared to the US, and the population is densely packed. This means the actual service providers can reach more people at a lower cost. The entire country is blanketed in a high-speed wireless network owned by a few huge telecom providers like DoCoMo. Also, local monopolies mean that companies are focused more on service and less on market share. This means a better network, which increases the value of a cellphone. Telecoms in the US would be hard-pressed to handle unlimited data for everyone (think about how many people would browse YouTube on the bus or subway... or in class or meetings for that matter), but the Japanese can do it.
Psychological: This is the important one: the Japanese are the pickiest consumers in the world, statistically. If a company slips up in the tiniest way, they will pay for it, both from that consumer and from negative word-of-mouth. In the US, these factors are diminished because of big businesses' lack of a relationship with the community, and countless studies have confirmed this effect. Because of this, only the highest-quality products manage to stay afloat in the Japanese market. You can't scrape by giving your customers crap and hoping they'll put up with it, because in Japan, they won't. Good luck changing that in the U.S. The nice thing to know is that some hi-tech phones from overseas are backwards-compatibile with some U.S networks, so you might be able to import and activate whatever phone you had in Japan.
That being said, the iPhone is still the state-of-the-art, as far as mobile design goes. The only thing I think it's missing that I've seen overseas and would like to have in an iPhone is the ability for it to replace your wallet plastic: credit card, subway rfid pass, university id, etc, and that's all infrastructure-dependent anyway. I'm sure that will come in time. No one else has such a simple, intuitive, powerful interface. The sad thing about the iPhone being released in the US is that we won't get to take full advantage of web applications leveraging the iPhone without an expensive data plan. Buy AAPL when (if) it gets released in Japan and Europe, because the profits will be ludicrous.
Hope that makes some sense. It turns out that the Japanese actually do have better inherent taste in everything, but it's not genetic, it's cultural.
Why do they have a monopoly? Because of our legislatures.
There you go.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
People in the US pay more for a lot of things. We pay more for music and movies. We pay more for TV. We pay more for internet. My travels in Latin America tell me we also pay a lot more than some people for food.
My own thought: people charge too much in this country for a number of reasons, such as high cost of living, but with technology services the biggest reason is because they can get away with it. Internet and TV service is a great example. I wouldn't be surprised if there are places where people still pay $30 a month for dial-up and it gets marketed as "fast". Most Americans probably aren't tech savvy enough to complain. I have also witnessed that companies set up monopolies, or in some cases N-opolies (where N might be the small number of cable or DSL providers in a city), to make sure that no one pays below a certain price. Meanwhile, in parts of Europe and Asia, people are paying a lot less for better service.
How does this relate to phones? I see it as the same thing that happens in this country with TV and internet. People overcharge for crappy goods and services. Why? Because they can get away with it. Sorry if it's flamebait, but we Americans are just too fat and stupid to notice.
"He just used the iPhone as the starting point for his article, as that is the most "modern" american phone."
Somehow he must have missed the part about the Nokia N95 being sold in the US. Hmmmmmmmmm
How can one phone save you 10-15 hours a week over another? What are you doing? Did you previously have no phone, so you had to drive across town several times a week to see if people were home to talk to?
It's not just the cell phones that lag behind their overseas counterparts. The average car on the road in the US is a trashy piece of junk compared to an average car in Japan or the UK. US houses and apartments are often shoddily built and poorly maintained such that after 30 years they are ready to be torn down. Roads in the US are often full of potholes, poorly patched pavement, dangerous angles, and cluttered with hideously ugly advertising signs and strip malls. Major intersections in cities are occupied by 8-way stoplights that meter cars through at about 80 vehicles per hour so they can fly ahead to the next 8-way stoplight in the next block. Europe uses......"roundabouts" that are about 100x more efficient than stoplights.
These are specific examples but there is an underlying theme to all of these. They are the result of uninformed, close-minded, consumers who don't expect anything better and are uninterested in anything better. It's not surprising, then, that the market penetration of Linux, Firefox, and OS software in general is much higher outside of the US.
The poster's right about phones not being extremely cheap, but generally speaking people pay significantly less than "retail" for their phones when they sign up for a contract. The phone subsidy is how the wireless company gets you to agree to a longer contract. I paid ~$50 for my RAZR, which seems pretty reasonable. The way it works is that you either get a cheap phone and a service contract, or you pay more and get an unlocked top-of-the-line model. It's not that complicated.
Another point is that the "national network" thing is more important than you might think. Sure Japan needs a greater cell tower density than the flat states because of terrian similar to Colorado, but here in the States not only are there numerous mountainous states, each of those states has a significantly greater land area than Japan. Think about the number of cell towers needed for 377,873 sq km as opposed to 9,631,420 sq km
It doesn't seem to me that there's some evil conspiracy by wireless providers to prevent customers from getting "good" phones. But complaining that you can't get a top-end phone on the cheap is silly
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Would the free market pundits please explain that the state of cell phone and cell phone service in America is clearly the best in the world because the free market system, the finest system in world history, decides the best, no, the finest course for our consuming needs.
The premise underlying most iPhone criticism comes down to judging every device as merely the sum of its parts. People (pundits and punters) look at the bulletted feature list and say "other phones can do more". Try sitting down with an iPhone, and really using it. The added value is in usability-- not just slick and attractive interfaces, but ones that let you use the device quickly and easily.
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I think technology is more ingrained into Japanese culture than it is in ours. Of course we have our spots (California, Washington, and parts of the east coast) but all in all I think this country has adopted a K.I.S.S. mantra. For everything really. I think phones have stayed simple because the populace hasn't demanded anything different. They accept the phones that are available and the majority do not import them from other countries. Nearly every phone maker that does business all over the globe picks and chooses which models will be sold where. We're the richest country in the world. Wouldn't you think they'd sell us everything they had? The fact is they don't and I happen to believe its because of our culture. I love the iPhone. Its the best phone i've ever used. It's already causing some waves. A provider, i forget which, just added visual voicemail to their service. (VV has been around for quite a while in Europe i believe.) I hope that it pushes competitors to start giving us full featured phones (like what is available in Japan and Europe) and not these crappy Razrs.
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I can't stand talking on a cellphone and will keep my landline as long as possible. Cellular phones compress your voice down to typically 9.6 kb/s. I really have a hard time listening and processing this overly compressed speech. It doesn't make a difference whether I use my cheap pay-as-you-go $20 Kyocera phone or my friends $400 super-duper Nokia.
Landlines devote 56 kb/s for voice data and it makes a huge difference. I can actually have a nice conversation with someone as long as they aren't on their own cellphone.
It's all about population density. Japan and most Asian and European countries are very densly populated. The reasons for this are many; good urban planning, good public transportation, lack of space, or simply the fact that the cities themselves grew in poverty or before the invention of the automobile.
e s-density-125.html ). Most major Asian and European cities on the same scale. Because square area is an exponential function, you need 100 times as many towers to serve a population that is 1/10 as dense (you need less cells per tower, but it's still more physical locations to manage and upgrade.)
American cities are spread out. Most US cities didn't really start exploding in population until cars were ubiquitous. That meant that you could live 30 miles from your job and the commute wasn't prohibitive.
The way wireless coverage area works, you don't need just twice as many towers to serve the same amount of people living at half the density of Europe, you need about 4 times as many. Forget the rural areas, covering the cities and suburbs is hard enough.
Now factor in that even the densest of US cities, Los Angeles (90th most dense city in the world,) is only about 1/2 as dense as Tokyo, or a staggering 1/10 as dense as Seoul (source: http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-citi
With these sorts of density figures, it definitely starts to screw with the numbers. You can't upgrade as often and still make a profit, and you have to treat your customers like crap because you can't afford to treat them well and still make money (and if they weren't making money, we wouldn't be getting cell service.)
You start looking at where you can make money, and it eventually leads to the fact that you have to make more off of every customer by nickel and diming them while you can't upgrade your network as quickly because it takes too long and is too expensive.
Is the only unrestricted cell phone I've owned in recent memory is my current one, which runs Windows Mobile. All the rest I've had to hack to add my own backgrounds, ringtones, and apps and to even do that I've had to buy an expensive "PC connectivity" kit. However this thing just speaks USB and talks to the computer right off. Also it is perfectly happy to change just about anything you want.
I'm not really such a smartphone fan as they are large and I don't really use it (work bought it for me) but I am starting to think I may stuck with it, just because I dislike having my phone locked down.
Since Slashdot mods equate speaking the fucking truth as "trollish", I'm not going to damage my karma, if you wonder why this post is AC.
You are so concerned about your Slashdot karma that you're not willing to post what you think under your ID? That leads me to believe that your Slashdot ID is really just a sham, because you're using it only to whore for karma.
It also strikes me as odd that you bash Slashdot mods for equating "speaking the fucking truth" (which seems to mean making ad hominem attacks against anyone who likes multifunction handhelds) with trolling, but at the same time you're concerned about keeping your karma high. If the system is so damaged, how do you manage to keep your karma high without "speaking the fucking truth?"
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
" Some even have upto 3.2 megpixel cameras "
SOME even have 5 MP cameras - e.g. the Nokia N95.
I can just talk for Italy and how the cell phones marked have evolved here.
Several years ago (early 90s), we passed from a system that technically forced us to bind the number to the phone (ETACS) to a digital one (GSM) that let us change the phone retaining the number (SIM) and vice versa.
This freedom of changing phone without too much hassle or changing the provider without renouncing to the "hardware" (the possibility of retaining the number while passing from a company to another is just a more recent thing) gave a big stimulus to the market, with main operators chasing each other lowering the fees more and more.
To get the edge in the market they kept adding features, with the consumer benefiting the most from this challenge.
UMTS licensing became a giant business for national governments here in Europe with telcos burning several hundred of millions of euro just to get the right to support that standard on their cellular networks - a big expense, yet right now I wouldn't even consider a provider not furnishing me HDSPA support, (we call it Super UMTS for marketing reasons) figure UMTS (yet it seems that for iphone buyers EDGE/GPRS suffice).
Only recently some companies are offering phones here in Italy, but just as benefits/prizes for using their networks - Offering a phone with usage fee, bounding at a contract for several years the customer is unthinkable.
To keep vital our market the italian anti-thrust agency has made several actions, maybe you need to awaken your anti-thrust agency to make the market fluid again?
"The average car on the road in the US is a trashy piece of junk compared to an average car in Japan or the UK."
aside from the lack of smaller cars do you care to back that up?
"US houses and apartments are often shoddily built and poorly maintained such that after 30 years they are ready to be torn down."
again, do you care to back that up with any real statistic or do you just want to keep blowwing smoke up peoples asses?
"Roads in the US are often full of potholes, poorly patched pavement, dangerous angles, and cluttered with hideously ugly advertising signs and strip malls."
uh, yeah. what part of the us were you in? i've seen areas that are with dangerous roads but it's not nation wide by any means.
"Major intersections in cities are occupied by 8-way stoplights that meter cars through at about 80 vehicles per hour so they can fly ahead to the next 8-way stoplight in the next block. Europe uses......"roundabouts" that are about 100x more efficient than stoplights."
while roundabouts may be a better method i must say that i've never seen an 8-way traffic light.
"It's not surprising, then, that the market penetration of Linux, Firefox, and OS software in general is much higher outside of the US."
os software in general? what are you talking about?
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
*Ahem* Remember the Windows 95 Plus Pack? Of course, you'd also buy Plus to get IE. Totally worth the premium instead of just acquiring Netscape off of a floppy or a mag cd.
some hardware/ software dork is going to make a simple easy cheap wifi phone hack to existing phones that does everything a cell phone does, but makes all calls to any number for free (i know they already exist, bear with me here). the phone companies will respond with the kind of "no 911"/ "my patents" legal assault that allowed them to shut down vonage
except the twist this time is that this will all be working without a corporate head to sue, so there will be no one to shut down, and no easy way to intervene in the network and indentify/ disconnect the interlopers. they'll have to resort to suing simple people off the street, a la the RIAA/ MPAA, which will of course suck, but just like with the MAFIAA, the die will be cast and the future will be clear: buh bye telco monopolies, hello nearly free mobile communication all over the world
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This guy is more or less spot on. The US has been severely hindered by garbage mobile service providers. It doesn't help that Americans are generally unaware of what's available overseas so they're easily swayed by the lamest bells and whistles. It also doesn't help that mobile phones are still seen as a fashionable product. Of course overseas there are still those looking for the latest phones, but not to the ridiculous extent seen in the US. Walk by any mobile phone store in the US and you'll see a crowd of people looking to replace a phone that's barely a year old.
Foreign markets have matured to the point that people are looking for basic phones that perform only basic functions while still looking nice. In the US you've got the self-important business people trying to look like they're vital to the company's success. So they have to get a Blackberry, even if they don't use 90% of it's function. Then you've got the Nextel/Boost Mobile crowd and their obnoxious walkie-talkie feature. I guess speaking loudly on the phone wasn't annoying enough. They need to advertise to the entire world that they're on the phone. Then you've got Verizon advertising crap like V.Cast which is little more than advertising the consumer has to pay to view.
Of course, the extent to which carriers cripple their phones is the worst. I recall years ago trying to get a data cable for my Motorola phone only to discover that Motorola started selling them in the US market at the insistence of AT&T Wireless and others. Obviously, they wanted to force me to pay to go through their own network. Then there's the absurdity of phones being locked to a single carrier. The whole point of a SIM card is that it enables me to easily switch carriers. But then these providers go and block me from that functionality.
I recall living in Taiwan back in 2000 to 2002 and hearing about the implementation of 3G. I recall companies bidding on frequencies but the implementation being slow because the system was such an over complicated mess. Even in Japan where it was being developed and tested they were running into issues. Otherwise 3G would have been fully implemented quite some time ago. Instead 2.5G was developed for the interim but since then, and I think already several years ago 3G was finally fully implemented. Here we are in the US with a system I don't think has moved much beyond 2G. And of course, once 3G comes along the carriers are going to scam even more money out of us. The same way the cable company screws consumers by charging more for digital cable. As mentioned in the article, I can get a superior service overseas for less money than it costs in the US. Well, in Asia, because in Europe everything still manages to be expensive.
The iPhone is somewhat unique even when compared to what's available overseas. Not for it's functionality but for it's distinct lack of buttons. Aesthetically speaking, however while featuring an nice design it offers nothing special. Hell, I bought a cheap NEC candybar phone almost two years ago that looks essentially like a small version of the iPhone. It has a black face with a metallic border and back. It's got individual buttons and a standard screen, but I've had people comment that it looks like the iPhone. And NEC managed to make the battery cover the same metal color as the rest of the back cover. So my point is that if we had available in the US what other markets have nobody would have even batted an eye over the iPhone, except maybe for Apple fanatics.
What I don't understand is why the service providers haven't been investigated for their underhanded practices. I'm convinced they're getting away with quite a lot.
The first one that I bought that wasn't a US phone, and I was impressed... the Ericsson R520M, long and bulky, but with the extended life battery, it will last 720 hours in stand-by, and something like 4 hours talk time...what other US phone will do that?
Then I found a DV007, and I am impressed...more PDA but also Phone, and in a smaller size than any of the PDA phones in the US...not to mention, I got the R520M for $60 (several years ago) and the DV007 can be had for just over $150...
What phone can do all this for that price in the US?? Certainly not the I-Phone...
--E--
"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?"
Interesting. When do you need extra ringtones to make a cell phone work? Anyway while carriers and MS may be monopolists when it comes to what they create. Neither has a monopoly on the "act of communicating with others", nor getting a computer to operate, respectively.
I agree. I'm actually happy with my cellphone and what I pay for it. I could care less about all of the neat-o features that Japanese people and European people apparently love. I pay Sprint something like $100/month for essentially unlimited phone calls anywhere, and I'm cool with that.
I don't respond to AC's.
Call me looney or disillusioned, or even delusional, but I don't see what his phone has on my SLVR, except cost. Looking at picture of the thing, I can see why the Casio is cheap, too. It looks cheap.
I have a SLVR candybar format. I have bluetooth, has CDMA which actually works in the rural area where I telecommute from (unlike Cingular/ATT), can surf the net on the phone with a top tier portable browser (nweb), can surf through the bluetooth connection, can upload images and ringtones all day long for free over BT, can download my videos and pics taken from phone to computer via BT, can send/receive email or text or MMS anywhere in the states with a CDMA network.
The only thing my phone lacks? The dumb hinge his phone will bust in a few years.
Yeah, I paid for it (and not a small fee), but I am not locked into a contract.
Are things really as bad as he makes it out to be for most of the cellphone users out there in the states? I could only believe if you are showing up at your service provider's doorstep asking for a sheering.
I wonder what a unlocked CDMA phone would run for in Japan? Oh. That's right, they are "stuck on GSM".
After seeing the iPhone introduction, I was totally confused by how much excitement it generated in the US.
... my father?
... we have a free market and nobody happens to offer what you want? Nah, that couldn't possibly be the solution.
Here we go again...
It offered no features I could see beyond my Casio W41CA's capabilities.
That sounds like saying "The Mac offers no features my 286 doesn't have". It's a new input method. (Does the Casio have multi-touch?) It's lacking in many other areas, e.g., the iPhone has 4-8GB so (if I had one) I could take all my music with me, but the Casio has only 70MB.
I had a lot of apprehension towards the idea of a virtual keypad and the bare screen looked like a scratch magnet.
Yup, even though nobody has complained about scratches on the iPhone screen, it "look[s] like a scratch magnet". Apprehension, people!
Finally, the price is ridiculous. The device is an order of magnitude more expensive than [...]
The sticker price is less than 1/3 of the price of using it for the shortest and cheapest plan (2 years). (That's like trying to convince people to buy more fuel-efficient cars: the cost of fuel is way less than the cost of insurance or the car loan, so why do they really care?) As long as service is so expensive, why does anybody (consumer or Apple) care what the phone itself costs?
After returning to the US from Japan, I've come to realize the horrible truth behind iPhone's buzz.
Oh no! Is it
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!
Phones in the US suck because
Someone please give me some insight.
You're not looking for insight. You're just ranting. Somebody looking for insight would have at least *tried* the iPhone before saying this. (How do I know you didn't? "Scratch magnet". Go try to scratch one now. Do it.)
GOATSE large at work impeding the progress of AMERICA
Here in Panama, my wife and I get out into the boonies frequently but only occasionally get out of cell range. There are two providers here and we use both. We use pre-paid cards; no contract, currently running about $.10 a minute. My wife has a bluetooth enabled Nokia with some fancy extras($200.00) but I use El Cheapos (basic Nokia or Motorola ranging from $8.00 ~ $30.00). Lots of poor folks use their phones just for receiving calls, which costs nothing, and buy a $2.00 prepaid card once a month to keep them active. Both systems are GSM and thanks to competition, you can get your Cable & Wireless GSM card replaced with a Movistar card for $3.95 and they throw in a book of coupons good for a $5.00 card every month for 12 months. Yep, third world cell phone service sucks compared to Gringolandia! :)
It's simple, anytime anybody introduces a new cell phone with advanced features they're lynched by screaming hordes of Slashdot trolls screaming Where In the US Can You Get Just a Cell Phone? and waving torches like something out of an old Frankenstein movie.
Cell phone companies divert so much of their budget to security forces to protect their US operations from these pitchfork bearing Slashdotters that there isn't much left to develop cell phone features.
Apple has the advantage of a legion of devoted followers who will engage in glorious battle with the "Just a phone" trolls thereby acting as cannon fodder (or pitchfork and torch fodder) to insulate the Apple employees working on actually developing products.
In Japan, they're literally referred to as "portable telephones", implying Japanese dependency upon cell-phones over normal "land-line" communications. So in their case I can understand if they are willing to pay more for their services, but I am unsure what their exact prices are. And that also explains why there are so many features to Japanese phones: there's a definite market for them.
In America, we still use land-lines for a lot of our communication. Now whether it's because of our population of luddites (no offense), our fear of higher cell-phone bills, or the lack of clear quality sound on cell-phones, we still like using them. I'm sure there are plenty of people in Japan who still use normal telephones, but in most metropolitan and even suburban areas cell-phones are the norm, and companies like DoCoMo benefit from this.
The question in my mind is this: if people were to switch to using their cell-phones 100% of the time and using no land-line, would this provide enough business to wireless phone companies that they'd consider dropping prices? I personally doubt it. Verizon, Cingular, and their ilk have become today's robber-barons, taking after the likes of Rockefeller and Carnegie (notwithstanding possible philanthropic aspirations).
My Sanyo M1 does everything the Iphone does except for Wi-Fi *AND* it has REAL BUTTONS!
I can surf the net, I can use Google Maps, I can watch YouTube.....
It's that Japan is so far ahead of us that it just seems that way.
In the US, the government allocates spectrum with an auction. This allows competing companies to spend large amounts of money to push each other out of particular geographic markets where spectrum is limited. Sometimes the competition gets fierce. Ultimately, these costs must be passed down to the consumer.
I don't know how Japan allocates spectrum, but if it's by some method other than an auction (like a lottery or competitive hearings) then it might have something to do with providers there being able to offer better service at a lower cost. I don't think it's the whole story, but it might be part of it.
NTT had a monopoly on all phone services in Japan. It used to cost over 70,000 Yen (about $590) just to get a phone line. People used to "rent" phone lines because it was so damn expensive (I did when I lived there). Keitais/Cells offered cheap phone service to anyone who could pony up the cash, and NTT couldn't control the market. So competition spurned this industry. Women in Japan are a huge consumer group, and they have lots of cash. So cell companies started selling all types of phones and plans because the consumers were willing to spend the cash.
Meanwhile in the US, just the opposite was true. Getting a phone line in your home costs about $20 with no contract, due in part to federal subsidies. Cell phone companies had to compete with a market where people already had phone lines AND were using computers (by contrast, Japan had virtually NO DSL as of 2000 and promoted ISDN). Cell phones were an obvious choice in Japan whereas they were an "additional" service in the States.
And you were right that geographically, Japan is much easier to cover. Over 90% of Japanese live on the coastal areas. The internal sections of most of the islands (especially Honshu) are scarecly populated. Makes setting up a network pretty easy.
"We're the richest country in the world."
Count your dollars. You are p$wned by the Chinese.
"Wouldn't you think they'd sell us everything they had? The fact is they don't and I happen to believe its because of our culture."
Right about one thing. There is a lot of stuff the Americans don't deserve to have, and good technology is one example. Have you seen your motor industry recently?
To summarize, its all the same circular issues:
Lack of competition, stupid people willing to pay extremely high demand and not seek quality, and rediculous lock-in contracts which most people don't have the common sense to know how to get out of (there are many ways). Most consumers don't even know the gov't passed a law some years back to make it legal to unlock your phone and yet people willingly let themselves stay locked in. Not to mention you can use roaming to cancel your plan without fees or cancel due to them changing the plan without your authorization (a letter doesn't count as an "okay, go ahead").
The next problem is that even with such things, most providers have no competition, and still manage to lock people in due to stupidity. There's a lack of choice and excess of charges. Remember that USF charge? People are still being charged for that under a different name. (cnet news.com link)
That said, having read this in-depth review of the iPhone as well as others, my list of iPhone deficiencies includes:
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
The author is right that were getting shafted on prices and plans, but....
I like my razr. It makes phone calls and can send and receive sms/email and gets charged only every 3-4 days. It gets dropped on the floor almost daily and has had more than its fair trip down a flight of steps and still continues make said phone calls. If I could change anything it would be less features. No camera, no web browsing, no fancy ringtones, 30% less buttons. Meanwhile let it keep the same weight and form factor(I can't tell its there if im not using it, but good weight and feel when I am) and I'm happy.
Case in point. One of the telcos is sitting on a patent for a cradle that goes in your home that turns your mobile device into an in-home pbx. You come home place the mobile phone in the cradle to which all your home extensions are connected to, and you can answer the mobile number from any phone in the home.
...
Where can you buy this cool gadget? Nowhere cause the telco that owns the patent was not manufacturing it.
The fact that communication is regulated by the Federal Communist Commission does not help much either. How I would love to see OpenCommunication and real competition
America is an ownership society, big business owns you now sit down and shut up.
Hope is the currency of fools
Only in the US do you have competing cell phone standards. This fragments the cell phone market. If I have a cool phone, to reach to full US market I have to create like 3 different version of it (one for each cell standard).
In japan (or the rest of the world), you make a GSM phone and you can reach the entire market. In the US, you get to pick AT&T or T-Mobile (and both of them are smaller providers).
The phone service providers in the U.S. took this advance knowledge, and attached hefty fees to everything that was popular in Asia and Europe - text, ringtones, photo uploads. When these features were first rolled out in Japan, they didn't know what people would find popular. So every phone manufacturer and service provider took the shotgun approach and bundled as many of these features as they could for as low a flat fee as they could. This was unbridled competition. By the time they figured out what was popular, they couldn't jack up the price because everyone expected it to be a flat fee, and raising the price would send your customers to your competitors.
When the digital cell network rolled out in the U.S., the providers here knew text messaging, ringtones, and photo sharing would be huge. So they attached a per-item fee to them to maximize profit on it. Every one of them did it, nobody broke ranks and offered a flat fee service (at least not without an additional fee). Kind of an implicit agreement to collude to fix prices to maximize everyone's profit.
Americans simply don't know that these things are free or a flat fee in the rest of the world. For them, a text message has always been 10-15 cents each. A ringtone has always been $1-$2. The cost per each one isn't that much, so they pay it. The same thing happened the other way around with landline telephone service in the U.S. vs. Europe. Most Americans (whose phone industry was deregulated in the 80s) pay a flat fee for unlimited calls. Most Europeans (with nationalized phone monopolies) pay per phone call. That's just the way "it's always been" and people don't know to ask for more.
Normally the market would correct this situation with a new company offering these services for less money. But the cell phone service market requires you to own bandwidth, which was auctioned off back in the early 1990s. There's no way for a new company to join the market (which is why the upcoming auction of the 700 MHz spectrum is so important, yes the one Google has been making noise about).
I just purchased an unlocked sony erricson k790a, and I couldnt be happier. and it was $200 cheaper than the iphone, and does all the same stuff and more. The only thing driving the iPhone is hype and wifi. Why, I ask, do you need wifi, when you have an unlimited data plan. You cant use voip on the iPhone, so really, what is the point? Another thing driving the crappy phone usage is that there are plenty of old people who "just want a phone" and that is all. It has been mentioned before, but really, that is atleast part of the issue. that and the size of the US.
I guess my point is that the US has a LOT of crappy options for phones, but because of the internet, we need not worry about those issues. Anyone can go on ebay or amazon.com and buy an unlocked phone if they care enough. Sure, our carriers are charging too much for outdated infrastructure, but what else is new.
There are two types of people in the world
1) Yaay more expensive hardware that doesn't do anything, YAAAAY upgrades all hail the new gadget and our corporate upgrading overlords
2) You kids get off my lawn
Telecomunication is a lot cheaper here in France.
And we still considere it expensive.
Look at the prices over in sweden/finland/norway....
And here all cell-phones have sim cards, whitch makes them compatible between the networks.
The iPhone is crap conpared to phones sold in Asia.
The on ly interesting feature is the multi-touch.
You can get more stuff in cheapers phones.
The probleme in the US is competitions. There's only 3/4 compagnies. And they probably agreed on an equal price ages ago.
There were no cell phones in the stone age.
The reason America is the only country with cell phones in the stone age is because we are the only country that has invented time travel.
I was watching a Charlie Rose on PBS last year and they had a guy talking about this issue. He said that it really isn't an issue of supply and demand, but more of greedy corporations trying to get every possible cent for a service. In South Korea the cell phones can receive live television, but here the cell companies are sitting on features like that saying that the cost to implement it is too much, the technology doesn't exist (but for some reason it is in S. Korea), the consumers don't want it, and are trying to figure out how to maximize profits when they introduce it. I'm not one of those anti-corporate folks, but what he was saying makes sense. Why is it that the majority of internet users are still on dial up? High speed companies don't want to offer service to a rural area because it doesn't have immediate profits. I don't want to get on a rant here but do you get what I'm saying?
A few years ago I was in Osijek, Croatia on business. While the city still had obvious artillery damage from the war, my business contact paid for downtown parking with his mobile phone. When the time he had paid for was about up, he would get an automated call, and could pay for more time during that call.
I know I still can't do this in the US.
The problem is a lack of standards, so that you need multiple sets of towers to cover a single area. That redundant equipment makes things expensive. Add to that 'vendor lock-in', because you can't take your phone to another carrier, and you end up with higher prices, and the high price discourages use of the features the phone companies want us to use so much.
The lack of standards also make it hard to develop *useful* applications like the parking application I encountered in Croatia.
Europe selected a single standard, and things have turned out much better there than it has in the US, where we 'let a thousand flowers bloom' and ended up with a mish-mash of incompatible network and phone standards, phones that have to cover multiple standards, phones that are locked into a single network, and high prices. Coverage is poor even in some populated areas, including stores and shopping malls.
So... People in the US don't use their phones much compared to other places on the globe. The carriers are all building the infrastructure to deliver lots of new and proprietary features, but because they are so expensive, few use them.
On top of that, the network providers have a poor reputation among their customers, so that does not encourage customers to even stay with the same carrier, let alone make them want to spend more with them.
Two recent new items that underscore that:
1. In the 'Red Tape Chronicles' on MSNBC, there is a story of a family that called their mobile provider to check to see if their Sprint contract was up. They were told that it was. When they changed carriers and canceled their existing phones, they were hit with a $300+ early cancellation bill, because -- according to the carrier -- their contract was NOT up, despite being told by customer service it was. Apparently making even minor changes to your service can result in the contract being extended.
2. Mobile customers who make a lot of calls to customer service (usually over billing issues) were being dropped because they were calling customer service too much. Huh? Talk about blaming the victim.
On a more personal note, one of my daughters has been caught in a 'trap' used by the carriers. Her initial contract was longer than the life of the battery in the cell phone. When the battery went bad, she found that the replacement battery from her carrier was priced high, so it cost almost as much as a new, fancier phone from the carrier -- which also came with an additional contract extension (at the same rate, while rates have been declining), which resulted in her being placed in the same position a couple of years later. I just bought her a new battery off of eBay, ($.99+ shipping) and we're going to let this contract expire.
So... Mobile phones and mobile phone service in the US is more expensive but yet lower quality than in many other parts of the world, so the networks are used less, and the phones have fewer features than in other places. A lack of standards results in fewer useful applications, and the applications that the carriers want us to use are proprietary, expensive, and not very useful.
-- Bill
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.
2) capitalism! I know it sounds strange, but many phones that are cheap are actually to cheap for companies to want to sell in the US. The US companies need to make certain profit margins and cheap cell phones do not help them make that. There are lots of 2 and 3 mega pixel camera phones out there that they do not want to release into the US all at ones. They want to trickle them in, so that they can make a profit. I know this sounds weird, but it is true.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
1) Two major players: Rogers (a.k.a Robbers) and Bell (a.k.a Dull)
Except out west where Telus is a major player, but yes, Rogers and Bell are the only truly national carriers.
2) Other smaller players with even worse service (Virgin, Fido, Telus etc.)
Fido and Telus aren't so bad. It really depends on which service package and phone you choose, ultimately.
3) Cannot get a phone without a contract (pay as you go is 15 cents-25 cents per call for the first minute and then a little lower for the next used time)
You absolutely, positively can get a phone without a contract, but you will have to pay full price for the phone. Why would any carrier just give you a phone for free without a contract?
4) Extra charges for receiving and sending SMS, as well as for having 911 and voice mail
Well, of course. There are plenty of service plans that include voice mail and unlimited incoming and outgoing SMS. The 50 cent 911 fee was mandated by the federal government a few years ago to recoup the costs associated with municipalities providing 911 service. Actually, if all you want is 911 service, any deactivated or inactive phone on any network will dial 911 for free, so long as you are within their service area.
5) Incoming call charges (I Wish I could find a Bell or Rogers executive, put him on a plane, and take him Pakistan where even the worst Telco does not charge for incoming calls, and then shoot him!)
It's always been this way in North America, but Fido and Rogers (and probably the others, I haven't looked) do offer particular service plans that do not charge airtime on incoming calls.
I really don't find any of these complaints all that genuine, especially considering that there are two truly egregious money grabs you haven't mentioned: Long distance and the notorious "system access fee". Long distance rates for all the wireless carriers in Canada are ridiculously over priced compared to wire line rates and those of wireless carriers in the United States, and the "system access fee" all of the carriers (except perhaps Bell) charge is nothing less than a blatant cash grab.
As far as cellphone network quality is concerned the so called third world has always has had better quality than the US. Sad but true.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Here in Europe, you usually get a phone thrown into a 2 years contract. So most people don't bother trying to get a phone, they already got one with their contract.
And what do they get? Whatever some cell manufacturer wants to get rid of. And it works. As long as it has a camera and can annoy everyone around with some stupid ringtone, the customer's happy. And hey, it's FREE, ya know?
With a practice like this, there is almost no market for "better" phones. Also a huge part of this is that phone companies become more and more global, and use the revenue gained in markets where they can act as monopolists to cross finance market battles in other areas. It's quite possible that the telcos in Japan are making a loss at the expense of customers in some areas of the US where there is pretty much only one phone provider, or where they miraculously gouge the same as their competitors (like here).
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
However, Motorola's sales are sagging as the population got tired of dime-a-dozen RAZR's and subsequent knockoffs.
That's a great deal. Please tell me where I can purchase these dime-a-dozen RAZR's!
I dont want a camera ....DONT....WANT....TO...WATCH...VIDEO...ON...2... .INCH...SCREEEEEENNNNNYEAAAAARRRRRRCGGGGGHGHHHH!!! !!
I dont want an MP3 player
I dont want an Ipod
I dont WanT A PDA
I
KABLAM!KABLAM!KABLAM!
I just want a F-ing PHONE.
You have the answer right there. The US market is not competing for the customers. They are more then happy to keep business as usual, and are not pushing the technology, just like their wired relatives. To them, there is no reason to roll out costly network upgrades to support the new technologies, because they control what technologies connect to their networks. This is unlike many other countries where the consumer decides what connects to the networks, the cell phone companies simply provide a SIM card that the user transfers to their different phones. Here the phones are locked down and stripped of their features. Look at Europe where many people own one phone but have several different "local" cell phone plans for the different areas where they frequently travel, they simply swap out the SIM card to use the other networks.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
After living in US and traveling extensively in Japan, I realized Japan is one generation ahead on any consumer electronics and white goods - even if they are not "made in Japan". The cellphones I saw in Japanese stores (with all more capabilities than iPhone) in 2004 I am still not seeing anywhere else in North America.
iPhone might have a better user interface...but thats not what this discussion is about.
Reading Slashdot and few other web magazines do not give you a clue about the rest of the world...you need to get out and see the world.
Since Japanese phones are so much better...what are some online stores I can go to purchase phones that aren't normally available here in the US?
It'd be a simple matter of putting my Cingular SIM card into a new, high-tech phone and copying the configuration information -- if I could find where to buy some from.
"In fact, I think his actual question was more like "Why are the features of the iPhone exciting, when the U.S. market should have been providing those or similar features already""
Because the iPhone isn't about "features". That's the game MS plays. Apple is about experience.
"In fact, his question is not low level enough. What he should be asking is why can't I buy a phone from any vendor, then a SIM card from a service provider, and plug it in and go?"
Well aside from the CDMA issue, do you really want cell phone carriers to discard the "blade and razor" model? For the low-end phones they alrady are, but for those high-end phones you all lust after, I don't think you could afford to feed your habit while paying full cost.
"I think that what is happening is a stratification of economy. In the U.S. we have "evolved" past the customer is always right business model, and entered the age where a companies most important job is pleasing stockholders, not customers."
I love "Us vs Them" conspiracy theories. I really do especially when they ignore important facts. Like the fact that customers can be (and are) shareholders.
"Europe and Japan were quick to adopt (and improve) many of our technological advances in manufacturing, etc. over the past hundred years,"
GSM is older than CDMA.
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.
"Imagine something like Colorado covered in metropolitan area. "
The eastern half of Colorado is the plains, sloped very gently to the east. Denver, for example, is not in the mountains.
when you can get a top-end phone on the cheap in other countries.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The matter of the fact is, that in the US the customer is just being ripped off, and that call phones carriers are intend on making as much money from it, without investing a lot of money. The US has a culture that encourages life today, forget tomorrow attitude. Long terms plans and gains are not in peoples agenda. Short term gains rules everything. Just look at how people is the US spend their money, how much they are in debt, and how much they save.
So population density is out as the sole explanation. I don't buy the culture argument either. Unlike their cellphones, Europeans aren't noticeably better (and some like Italy are considerably worse).I have to agree with the poster. The iPhone is nothing new. My Treo 650 can do everything the iPhone can, and some things it can't. When I heard about the iPhone, my first reaction was "oh fuck, the fanboys are going to be unbearable about yet another Apple toy that's a copycat."
To be honest, Apple appears to me to be a lot like Microsoft: they are both good marketing firms. Microsoft just happens to understand the psychology of upper management, and so sells well to them. Apple happens to understand the psychology of fanboys and whips them up into a frenzy to sell everyone on an image that has very little substance behind it. Sure the iPhone "looks" cool but in the end it's just a phone that brings nothing new to the market.
As for a reason why America lags behind Japan? Consumer lock-in, my friend. Monopolies tend to do things like that.
Nathan's blog
The OP makes a valid (and humorous) observation that regulatory agencies have a role to play in the types of features and services that are offered for cellular phones in the US. Your troll comment degraded the discussion.
Seriously. 640x480 screen, 2MP+, broadband internet. FM radio? Hah, stream MP3s from your home PC!
Yah they cost starting at $300+ w/o a contract. The problem is that the only way to get the really sexy Windows Mobile phones is without a contract, because so few carriers offer them!
Heck, we have had sexy phones available here for years now!
Link time:
o2 XDA
I-Mate JasJar
The I-Mate ultimates are also coming out soon, and they are some awesome phones. With 128MB of RAM and a 520MHZ CPU, they also will be screaming along in terms of speed for general processing tasks.
Ultimate 7150
Ultimate 7150
Anybody want an 8GB HD with their phone? Try the HTC Advantage X7500
The issue is, finding any of these phones from a carrier. Once in a while a few of them end up on the big companies offerings, but far too often, they have to be purchased separately.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Just to clear up a bit of misinformation below about the UK phone market:
There are two ways to have a phone: Contract or Pay-as-You go.
With Pay-As-You go you pay high costs for the handset and after that you buy calling credit which is typically a slightly higher price (than contract) per minute/text message. You can buy credit almost anywhere in the form of a scratchcard from the corner store or even from an ATM. There are no monthly charges. Typical text message cost is 10p (20c).
On a contract you'll get the phone free or for some token price. A typical monthly charge would be in the £30 ($60) range but with that you'll generally get more free airtime (I get 600 minutes) and text messages (I get 1000) than all but the heaviest users will use in a month. It's more or less a flat fee. Data rates are currently expensive but getting cheaper.
In the UK at least text messaging is extremely popular and not just amongst teenagers. I'm 35 and will generally use it more than the phone feature itself. I'm not unusual in this respect.
The UK market is extremely competitive. Contract deals are improving almost every week (more free minutes/texts, lower monthly charges). Towards the end of a contract your provider will generally ring you and try to offer you better phones and better rates to stay with them. All for free. I tend to change my phone about every 18 months and currently have Sony Ericsson W950i and very nice it is too. I don't believe I've ever paid a penny for a handset.
It sounds to me that one of the problems in the US market might be the inertia that the States has moving from one generation of technology to the other means that the market moves at a slower rate than the innovations. It could also be that the carriers simply aren't generating enough revenue from mobiles in a country where most land-line calls are are free. The only other reason why you're not getting the cool phones at reasonable prices might be that the providers are operating a cartel.
We need 'portable' radios...and I'm not talking GSM. We need programmable radios capable of working on any frequency. Phones are too coupled to their carrier for things like 3G...and NOT upgradable (in perpetuity) like a PC is. I could conceivable stay with my 8525/Hermes for many years...but at some point it will be deemed a "dead" device and I will no longer be able to upgrade to WM7, etc. And at some point many sites will be using the new flash/etc. technologies which I won't be able to put on my phone. My phone is locked to ATTs network in more ways than one. I could quit service with them...but which carrier could I then switch to with my phone? None. I don't even want a phone-sized form factor...I would rather have phone capabilities via an add-in card on my UMPC or TabletPC...but these cards are for data only. This would let me strip out all unnecessary phone/vendor crap and just have basic voice/data via some other 'master' device. When this day arrives (and when I can strip out voice service too...I make like 5mins calls/mo!) I will be quite happy...and wallet will be fatter.
I have one of the G-Shock cell phones from Casio myself. It's water and shock resistant, but its also extremely responsive (at least for the std phone, web and email features), and its been my primary /. reading device for the past year or so.
It seems that the Japanese telecommunications industry are under fierce competition between each other, but its also very heavily regulated. There are three primary cellular carriers, and the antitrust department seems to apply additional restrictions when one of them gets too powerful. Some of the practices that I've heard are normal in the States (such as huge fines for cancellations) have been ruled to be illegal (antitrust and consumer protection laws). Even if you sign up for an annual contract, the carriers cannot charge you much for the cancellation fee (about $30 fee for yearly contracts). Even if you buy a phone for 1 yen (less than 1 cent) with a 3M pixel camera, etc., you can still cancel the service on the next day. You may be charged apx $30 to cancel the discount options if you signed up for them, and you'll still be charged the initial registration fee (about $25), but the cancellation fee itself is free unless it changed recently.
Another big difference that I noticed is the attitude. The Japanese carriers seem to be willing to do everything in their power to make their existing and potential WANT to use their service. When I bought a phone in the US (Verizon), the retailer was nice (obviously to sell me a phone), but the carrier made it sound like they were doing me a favor for letting me have the privilege to use their service...
Finally somebody post something I wanted to say long time ago.....I think North America should stop locking their phone, and let their user choose whichever phone company is the best for them.
Nope, it's all our bone-headed telecommunications laws and their discouragement of competition and long-term benefit, in favor of a quick profit for the incumbants. (And of course the greedy incumbant telecom companies themselves, but that goes (almost) without saying.)
But what're you going to do? Start your own wireless phone company? How? You can't afford to buy spectrum (all bought by the incumbant's, and their fat wallets gurantee a high barrier to entry). You can't afford to buy reliable backbone bandwidth (owned by, guess who, the incumbants) or to build your own (thanks to sweet-heart deals made with the incumbants; but don't worry, it was all paid for with tax-incentives; so YOU paid for it in taxes, but it's owned by the incumbants now). I guess you could try VoIP, but the overblown-requirements for 911 compliance (forced through by the incumbants's lobbyist) will kill you, assuming you dont get your packets blocked, or your calls mis- and un-routed, or the chips used in your handsets tarrifed and blocked for "patent" issues... all by the incumbant telecom companies.
Our phones suck because there's no competition.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
You tell me how the American economy is doing any better than Japan or any country in Europe. Even Greece is doing better than the U.S. in terms of economic growth. We are a declining economic superpower.
Lots of bloated responses, lots of good statements. My take simply:
1. Capitalist markets center around what the customer wants, at the best price
2. American customer as a whole choose a lot of "free" phones. As a blob many/most aren't willing to pay for phones. This may currently be changing.
3. Initial development of data through copper in US was leapfrogged by European and Asian countries who pushed funding toward wireless technologies.
4. US has a much much larger footprint to maintain and upgrade (tower wise), so as we move much more slowly through wireless technologies, phone technology/lifecycle replacement moves much more slowly too. GSM, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA, WCDMA... upgrades aren't as bad with a footprint the size of an american state. We have a lot of infrastructure to maintain when an architecture/standard change happens.
5. The open market rule is stick the customer for all you can, as long as they are willing to pay for it when there are few providers/competitors. Unfortunate.
Japan has a telephone monopoly (NTT), as do many European nations, one way or another. These monopolies are tightly regulated so that, among other things, they simply CAN'T make customers sign up for multi-year contracts (at least tis was my experience with Orange and Virgin, YMMV). Since they can't offer a "discount" on the phone for the contract, all phones are sold at full price. A price which is lower that the full price for the phone would be in the USA because the manufacturers jack up the prices to (perversely) encourage customers to sign multi-year contracts because THEY MAKE MORE MONEY THAT WAY (the total of the carrier fees and the "discount" price you pay for the phone is almost always more than they would have made selling the phones individually).
On top of that, there's phone locking. In Europe, all carriers and phones are GSM and all phones are interoperable between carriers simply by switching the SIM card. In the USA, despite the fact that MOST phones are GSM and have SIM cards, carriers implement locking to prevent users from moving phones from carrier to carrier. The locking must be removed by a hacker and it's probably illegal to remove it.
But make no mistake, it is the fault of Motorola, Nokia, and now Apple for playing this reindeer game. You certainly CAN sell unlocked GSM phone in the United States that will work with many carriers. They could bow out of this nonsense and sell their phones in consumer electronics stores. Apple chose a partnering deal with AT&T out of greed.
Right now the biggest problem is that the carriers have convinced the public that they HAVE to sign multi-year contracts in order to get phones. Go to a major carrier and try to sign up month-to-month, NON-PREPAID. It's only Virgin that's offering such plans now and they're being terribly squeezed by the Bells (remember what they did to Covad?).
The solution here is clearly tighter regulation. Cell phone service in the USA has suffered due to the Wild West attitudes of the carriers. They had their chance. It's time for the government to step in and impose standards that will benefit consumers.
(I'm in Canada, with many of the same issues as the US)
I just bought an HTC P4000 and I've got to say that it, like the iPhone, blows just about everything else out of the water. It has features that realistically should be much more widespread and popular than they are, and while looking around at other phones around the world it appears to be well inside the range of non-N.A. phones' features.
Things like wi-fi connectivity, camera, video player, bluetooth, pda capabilities, voco, maps (with GPS, which is not on the P4000 unfortunately), mobile versions of Word and Excel, blah blah, blah....should be on the majority of devices now, but a lack of competition is holding things back.
In Canada, where much of the country has one choice of provider or no signal at all, or even two providers using the same towers (as Bell and Telus do many places) with the same phones and plans, there is no incentive for the companies to provide good service or any innovation. All you have to do for proof in this regard is look at the massive outcry in the last few years with Telus, requiring major CRTC intervention.
The author's story and stories like it are only half true.
We always hear about how much better the devices in Asia are, and generally it's true.
However what's certainly not true is that service plans in Japan are anywhere as good a value as in the USA or Canada.
Having lived several years in Japan, I can tell you that although the author has a 3000 yen "voice" plan, it probably includes something like 20 to 40 minutes. Japanese rate plans are not measured by minutes however, rather time is priced according to a draconian function of time of day, location, day of the week, and destination network, and deducted from your voice pool. Once the author exhausts his base 3000 yen (about 30 minutes say), another formula kicks in charging upwards of 70 cents per minute if used on a weekday during the daytime to a cell on another network. 30 minutes use for a $40 plan? Would that work in the USA or Canada?
By the author's own admission, he never uses voice so he may not have noticed. However, attempting to use a phone for professional purposes, where the majority of work is done via voice, you can see how the Japanese carriers' ARPU is astronomical compared to the USA, where competition may not improve devices but it certainly drives down price.
Surely it's this increased ARPU that allows Japanese carriers to monstrously subsidize flashy, impressive handsets for both business and personal users.
Away! I'm going to end up in jail one day for punching some random obnoxious asshole, walking around in public and talking at full volume on his ridiculously priced phone, then almost killing me int he parking lot because he's too busy dialing to watch where he's driving. Mobile telephones were invented with yuppies in mind and have become some teenage fad and seemingly infected everyone. They began as annoying, useless pieces of technology and only get worse with each new "feature" (text messaging and so-called cameras?!).
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
GREED
Scotland may have sparse areas. America has a whole mess of it. I've driven across it. There is a whole lot of nothing all over the place.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
..do people get their phones from the network providers? All this product bundling and exclusion have got to be a big factor in retarding progress. It's fucked up that I think of my phone as being a T-Mobile product rather than a Samsung product.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
In future in any slashdot discussion where you intend to trash the iPhone, please include the following information :
Have you actually used an iPhone : yes [] no []
thank you
If you like phones with user interfaces that look like ass, then go ahead and use that Nokia. Raw features aren't what the iPhone is about.
* If you want something that doesn't look like the interface was designed in 1986, get the iPhone.
* If you want something that doesn't feel like the designers had no respect for their customers, get the iPhone.
I just bought one, and for me, the browser alone was worth the price.
Is it perfect? Of course not. Anyone who expects it to be all things to all people is being unrealistic.
Is it a phone that I actually enjoy using? You bet.
Just get a Blackberry and quit crying. iPhones DO suck and who the hell cares about Japan? Good day.
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
Cingular and T-Mobile at least have prepaid plans, and you can just buy a SIM card on ebay and plug it in to any unlocked phone.
I'm doing this, and the minimum cost is quite low - on T-Mobile it's $100 for 1 YEAR (1000 minutes).
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
"Hell most phones in Japan now have awesome built in OCR capabilties (getting Kanji readings seriously is AWESOME for someone learning the language)."
Comes in handy when scanning your celluar bill in.
"heres a whole laundry list the OP doesn't go into that I'd kill for in the US market. "
Can I fly the Space Shuttle with one of these phones?
I just changed services yesterday. I drove the salesperson nuts but I didn't get a single condition I wanted. Every single service was the same, there were no options. Everyone had two years contracts where as I wanted no more than a one year. I wanted an iPhone but I can't swing it. If I want out of the contract in a year it'll cost me $200. Well I thought that was for the extra cost of the cell phone. Nope the store will charge me $200 if I cancel in less than six months because they are paying for the phone. The $200 the phone company is charging is simply because they can. I paid an extra $100 to get a razor, it may be trendy but it seemed the best option. The salesperson also lied to me that I didn't have to send in for the $50 rebate, I wasn't happy about that. I was also annoyed that I didn't want text messaging or internet but I was warned that if I recieve a text message or accidentally hit the button for the internet I'd be charged. I asked can I disable it? No I couldn't. So if some one decides to text message me I get charged. They also lied about that. I was told it'd be $0.10 a message. When I got the contract it turned out to be $0.15 a message. Basically there were no options with the service and they were all the same. That's essentially price fixing when every company decides to set the same conditions and give no options. I even asked if there was an option of buying a phone outright, paying $300, and not have a contract? Nope, not a single service offered to sell you a phone and sell you a monthly service. It's a scam to lock you into 24 month contracts and they are all involved. There are a couple like Virgin offering monthly contracts or pay as you go but they are very expensive and the support on Virgin was miserable beyond belief, that was the service I cancelled. When my battery went dead I tried switching the service to a new phone. I only wound up killing both phones and tech support after over an hour was of no help. I wish I could recommend Virgin but their plans suck and if you need support they'll put you through hell. I happened to talk to one of their reps when I tried to buy the replacement phone and she admitted that support was by far their biggest complaint but their upper management had no plans to fix the mess. They are a last ditch service so they aren't responsive to their customers. Everyone is complaining about iPhones but when you compare them to what else is out there I can't see anything better. The phone itself is expensive but the service providers tend to be six of one and half a dozen of the other. Cell phones in general lack options. Your only choice buying a cell phone or not buying one, they spoonfeed you conditions. Congress really needs to take on the phone companies over the condition fixing but first they have to stop taking tens of millions from the telecoms.
My wife and I have been sharing a phone for years, and it's about time I got a new one. But I hate shopping for one, because I know all that stupid lock-in sales tactics I'm going to find. Yes, even online.
If you shop online anyway, why not just order a phone from Europe or even Japan?
it's simple why the North American cell carrier's won't sell the phones people "really want". If you will pay 50 dollars a month for a few hundred minutes of calling, or they allowed you a 5 dollar "data plan", then you could activate voip on your phone and NO LONGER need the measly minutes they are butt-raping you for. They are out at LEAST $45/month per user. THAT is why Canadian data plans are 4 dollars /MB etc.
THAT is why it's nearly impossible to get a wifi enabled phone device activated on rogers or bell WITHOUT an expensive data plan.
First, we'll check out your carefully-selected feature comparison.
iPhone - Treo
128MB - 64MB
4-8 GB Hard Drive - 2GB SD Slot
Visual Voicemail - No, thank god.*
Auto-Landscape Mode - Unnecessary (square aspect ratio)
Phone Numbers from Webpages - Yep
Integration with Movie/Music Service (iTunes) - No, thank god.*
Easy "Pinch" and "Spin" Navigation - Actual keyboard and a touchscreen
Auto-Threading of SMS Conversations - Yep
On-Screen Conferencing options - Yep
Safari Browser with "Zoom on Element" Features - So many browsers I can't be bothered to list them here.
Rich email client - Yep. Dozens.
Smooth Integration with Google Maps, Youtube, and Mac Widgets - Yes, no (thank god), and no (thank god).
Next, I'll point out the price of this phone.
Price of the Treo 650 (which stacks up to the iphone except for itunes and youtube): $150 on eBay. Unlocked.
So, youtube and itunes. Worth a couple hundred bucks to you?
* Items with asterisks require proprietary service agreements to be useful. Try getting "visual voicemail" on any carrier but at&t. Also, AKAImBatman refers to "Integration with Movie/Music Service" as though it can be other than iTunes, which isn't the case. It's iTunes or gtfo, and I consider it disingenuous not to specify that.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Let's see here.
...and according to the respective product sheets, the Casio actually does far less, with worse battery life.
W41CA: 400x240 screen
iPhone: 480x320 screen
W41CA: 70mb of memory
iPhone: 4 or 8gb of memory
W41CA: 49 x 103 x 22mm, 126g
iPhone: 61 x 115 x 11.6mm, 135g
But the specs alone don't tell the story; the real story is in the implementation. It's arguable that the iPhone does nothing new, but the way it does it is really the key. Try using one, you'll see what I mean.
I've been to Japan on a number of occasions, and I'm actually returning there at the end of August. The Japanese certainly do love their gadgets, but the idea that they are any more than at best 6 months ahead of the US market is just not accurate.
Storm
If you want to release a kick-ass phone in Japan, or Europe, or Asia, or Australia, or South America, or ALL OF THEM, how many different hardware designs to you need to create? ONE. They all use GSM. BILLIONS of potential customers for that one design.
If you want to release a kick-ass phone for everyone in JUST the USA to use, how many different hardware designs do you need to create? Many. Maybe a dozen. At least four just to cover the major players, each with a few MILLLION users as potential customers, most of them locked into their service for two years and no way to bring their phone to another service provider. Some American networks use some GSM, but they are mostly comprised of other America-only proprietary standards of PCS, TDMA, CDMA, etc.
And why is it like this? The free market! Other countries decided it would be smart to use team work to help their people, drive down costs, increase competition, make service more reliable with less masts, and foster innovation. In America it's every man for himself, or at least every company for itself. Each company made their own incompatible standard in order to lock in customers and make it expensive or impossible to leave and go to a competitor, thus reducing or eliminating the threat of competition. Less competition, less of a need to come out with snazzy phones. Of course, each company has to build their own masts, so you often have 3 to 6 competing antennas where in the rest of the world there would be one. This is expensive so they cut corners with service where ever they can. But your phone works if you stand in the yard, right? In Europe they work indoors, on trains, even in basements.
The root cause is basically cultural.
1)Americans think bigger is better. This mentality still applies even with phones.
2) Most Americans are very ill-informed about the outside world so have no clue what is really going on elsewhere.
3)Americans feel most comfortable when every street in the US has the same stores so they can buy the same tired old crap from big familiar names. Thats why McDonalds are so ubiquitous yet make sure they never change their recipies or have any deviation between stores.
3) has led to the telecoms industry in the US becoming a closed marketplace because everyone goes with only a few big phone companies so now they control the whole US market(names like Sprint, AT&T, Verizon). Between them have full control of the whole US marketplace.
The phone comapnies have no motivation to improve their phones because they have worked hard to ensure there is no real competition. A couple of examples of how they do this is:
1) by selling phones that are locked to their own service only
2) by making sure that all the companies sell almost exactly the same phones as their competition so there is no real choice.
Those fat old clamshells that you end up paying $100 and a 2 year subscription for, actully cost the phone companies next to nothing because they are crappy old designs that the rest of the world don't want any more so the phone manufacturers ship all their old stock that won't sell anywhere else any more to the US. The phone companies love it too because the make more profit from selling older phone styles at premium prices and don't have to pay the extra costs of keeping their product lines up to date.
No new investments and high prices mean more...
... profit, profit, profit, profit, profit, profit, profit, profit, profit, ...
... for them while the rest of society suffers.
Not much competition either? Think local monopolies and perhaps cartels.
(Don't you just hate telcos?)
I've come to the conclusion that it's not only important services, such as education and healthcare, that are better off in public hands, but also important public infrastructure, such as electricity, water, sewage, roads and... telecommunications (public pipes, private services). Privatizing these things creates monopolies and nowhere else in the world has this gone as far as in the United States. So, no wonder...
Here's why: Multiple standards. Poor coverage. Tight phone-operator binding.
By multiple standards, I don't mean GSM vs UMTS, I mean things outside of a single standards roadmap. The Swedish mobile market is healthy because of two big local phone companies (Sony Ericsson, half Swedish and Nokia, Finnish; there's also Swedish minor act Neonode) that both on average make reasonably good phones; because of wide availability to almost any phone brand whose phones will work with the Swedish networks; because of a single standards track (GSM and UMTS) and easy portability; because of reasonable nation-wide coverage for any carrier (not just Carrier X works in cities A, B and C); because of the way you can go out and *just buy a phone* without the carrier nonsense in any non-carrier mobile phone store and then go home and insert your SIM card and it will *just work*; because you don't need to pay for receiving SMS messages; because you can send and receive as many SMS messages as you want and pay as you go along; because pre-paid and proper monthly plans are both offered and treated seriously by every carrier.
Everyone in Sweden - absent small children, pets and people that have actively chosen to not use a mobile phone for various reasons - have a mobile phone. It's not mandatory, yet everyone have them. Everyone. Just like regular phone connections. This is the sign of a well-functioning free market. I don't expect the US carriers to get this. They have too much to lose, they'll have to change in dramatic ways to stop shafting their consumers and help spreading the technology. Don't get me wrong, Swedish carriers are also getting around to putting bullshit restrictions on "operator phones" saying which apps you can install; a practice introduced in Sweden by multi-national carriers Vodafone and 3.
How much of a factor is NIMBY in this whole discussion?
How about: US government encourages lock-in with the way they allocate spectrum. The result is that carriers don't really have to compete.
Carriers should be given (or purchase, whatever) access to a common spectrum and required to use a standardized communications method. We've got this 800/900/4800/4900mhz and SIM card/ embedded SN bullshit going on over here and it just exacerbates the problem!
The government's job is to solve problems like this! Instead, it's just looked at like a land-grab and they cater to their highest campaign donor. WTF?
You can find SIM cards paired with CDMA phones in places like Korea. You'll also find that the newer GSM standards (UMTS) have adopted CDMA signaling.
The revolution will be mocked
Yes, the main reason our cell phone system sucks is because our POTS system was so good.
Tech-wise there is usually an every-other phenomena that goes on. When your 1st Gen infrastructure sucks and the the 2nd Gen comes out, you don't bother to upgrade your 1st Gen system, you just go whole hog, investing all your money into the 2nd Gen system. Conversely, when the 1st Gen system is really good, you see little reason to move to the 2nd Gen system. Even as you do, you have to split your investment dollars between the 1st & 2nd Gen system. Which means your 2nd Gen system ends up sucking. Now when you go from 2nd to 3rd Gen system the situation is reversed between the two countries. And when I use the term "Gen" I don't mean incremental generational differences (CDMA vs 3G [or whatever]). I mean full revolutionary generational changes.
Europe (the UK especially) had a notoriously bad POTS system. So, when Mobiles came about they jumped on them with a gusto. In the US the POTS system is/was fantastic. So, many still feel no need for a mobile. I personally am morally appalled that they want to change me for INCOMING minutes. That is double billing; you are charging 2 people for the same call.
The iPhone is amazing because of its interface, not the number of checkboxes next to a comparison of "features." I could care less if a Treo allows me to console into my linux box or control my pc desktop remotely because I will NEVER do those things on my phone. I don't take pictures with my camera phone because they're a pain to get off. I certainly wouldn't use my old samsung slider to show off my pictures.
I'm so sick of phones packed with "features" that I use once, say "oh that's neat", then never use again because finding it in the interface takes me 5 min.
That's the thing phone developers should learn from the iPhone. Who cares how many "features" it has if I never use them. I want usability first. And in that regard, nothing I've seen to date compares to the iPhone.
Well one reason the carriers have much, much more area to cover. Japan is about 145,840 square miles, while Florida (where I live) is alone over 1/3 of that at 54,252 Square Miles. California alone is 3537441 square miles.
So the US carriers have to have much, much more infrastructure to cover. And infrastructure costs money, which comes from, you guessed it, the customer.
I first saw this in a Wired magazine circa 2000, but it's been going on a while.
- Insufficient competition (due to the rest of this list).
- Too many laws restricting use of technology (IP protection, trade restrictions, access to air)
- Too many laws restricting competition
As a result, prices are considerably higher than the rest of the world and available equipment is far lower.
One probable factor though is that we have high level of telephone access - which is not true of some of the areas with much better access to cell technologies.
Oh - I've got an O2 XDA (purchased in Hong Kong by one of my predecessors) that's a couple of years old - and supplies more features than all of the phones I've seen so far. I'm in Canada though and if people think the US is bad, Canada is far worse.
The iPhone has a glass screen, bud. I assume you're not walking around with a pocket full of diamonds...
http://www.farmerbob.org
My company works on contract for major providers like Sprint and Motorola. What I hear over and over again from employees from those companies is that their profit margins are extremely thin due to market pressure from competitors. The heat is on to keep rates low and provide 99.998% network uptime. Providers dump huge amounts of money in to backbone R&D (remember, the US covers a lot of landmass) and don't have much capital left over for cool innovations on the end-user phone.
my 2 cents
...that just does what it was designed to do without the service providers interference?!?! Just give me the functionality that I paid for without locking it out or making me pay extra for?!?!
It's just that simple
Remember the old days of Ma Bell, before Bell was broken up by the government? You may be too young. Back then, the only way to buy a telephone was through Bell. You couldn't just drop into Target or Wal-Mart, grab one of a large selection of phones of various styles, take it home and plug it in. You had to buy it through Bell, and what you got was cheaply-made, only had essential dialing functions, and costed a fortune.
The cell phone carriers are a heavily-regulated (and essentially government-sponsored) oligopoly. If you want to sell a cell phone, you can't sell it directly to consumers. Instead, each carrier will give you specific requirements for you to meet and a way to lock your phone so that it only works with their network. Just like in the bad old days of Ma Bell.
Elsewhere, such as Japan, you buy whatever phone you want directly from the handset manufacturer, plug in a SIM card, and enjoy what you bought.
Americans spend their money nice cars, big houses, huge screen tvs. Those kinds of cultural obsessions just don't work in a densely populated country like Japan. There are also millions of wage earners that live with their parents. If I have extra money I start looking for a better apartment, if they have extra money they buy a new gadget. They might make less than me, but since they live with their parents more of their income can go to toys. There might be enough moneyed technophiles in the U.S. to support the iPhone, but there aren't enough to support an entire industry of iPhones.
I think it's because the culture in America doesn't wish to have a phone that does everything. It's there, there is a niche, but most of use just want a cellphone to make calls and do a few other things, not everything under the sun.
more feature certainly may be more common at a price comparible to US prices with less to an American with an American income but for the Japanese is it really that much cheaper?
d -factbook/index.html
japan GDP - per capita $33,100 (2006 est.)
us GDP - per capita $44,000 (2006 est.)
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worl
The monopoly just happens to resemble two or three big companies. We've allowed the baby bells to re-merge and we're wondering why it appears that we have one monolithic phone company again with no competition. Huh. How'd that happen?
Here's an idea. Let's get some trust busters in there, and start calling companies on their "need to be big to compete in a global marketplace" bullshit. They need to be big to maximize profits for shareholders, that is all. There's no free market. The Supreme Court in fact just ruled that we could have minimum prices on products. So we can actually expect less innovation and higher prices from cell phone manufactures and providers.
There are only two ways to fix the markets:
1) Break up the monopolies again. Cingular and AT&T were just fine as 2 companies. They'd be even better as 10 companies.
2) Alternatively, create open spectrum and rule that all cell phone devices must be able to switch between networks.
It's simple. Unlikely to happen since the telephone lobby is VERY old and VERY powerful, but very simple to fix.
I think it's pretty simple. Most of the features being offered that you were happy to get on your phone, the average person doesn't care about or has no desire to use. No real market for those features, no need for the companies to push them. Hell, I consider myself a pretty tech-savvy user and I really don't give two craps about internet browsing, mp3s, etc on my cell phone. Only thing I ever do is check sports scores or movie times, and that I can do with something like a DS or PSP and have a game machine too.
Just a few thoughts, anyway.
Does anyone have any problems with Tmobile on here? do what i one, got a free tmobile phone just for the contract and imported and Sony Ericsson W850i for europe. popped the sim out of the tmobile phone, sold it on ebay for 50 bucks and popped the sim into me new W850i now im more than happy.. iphone is tooooo overpriced for me for what it does. looks cool but thats as far as it goes.
*Gratuitous Sig/Plug* Heres my website - firesuite
I also remember being surprised by how thoroughly backwards the US is about a lot of stuff when moving here from Aus a few years ago. Retail banking is like stepping back to 1974. It's bizzare.
Lets imagine for a moment that we're not talking about portable devices here at all; say batteries didn't exist or something.
In this alternate, 100% wired universe, I have a home a computer connected to the Internet, and a telephone connected to a POTS line.
I like my telephone. It's a simple, durable device that does one thing extremely well - send and receive phone calls.
I also like my computer. It's a general-purpose computing device which can do just about anything it's programmed to do.
I would absolutely hate trying to use some hacked up, modified, "enhanced" phone as some kind of email terminal, web terminal, personal calendar (that calls me with reminder notices), etc. I have a computer which does all of those things much better and more elegantly (and modularly, i.e. I can replace those programs with better ones) than any hacked-on hard-wired add-ons to a phone ever could.
However, I would love to have a telephony application on my computer (paired with a headset or a handset peripheral, or just using my speakers and microphone). It's one more thing my computer can do, and I could pick the telephony app which does it best. Eventually someone would realize that you could send voice data over the same connection that the computer uses for internet access, and you've have voicechat (VoIP) to replace the old POTS system, getting rid of one of the cables going into your computer.
In an analogous case, I've also got a television. I think we can all agree here that WebTV sucks - televisions should not try to hack on computer functions. However, a TV tuner in your computer is pretty damn cool, one fewer monitor taking up space, you can watch TV in a window, record it to an MPEG file, etc. Even cooler is video on demand over the internet ala YouTube, which, like voicechat and POTS, would eventually displace broadcast TV.
I think the people (myself included) who are clamoring for "just a phone, damnit" and thinking along these lines. Stand-alone email terminals hacked into telephones suck. (I think I actually recall a few of these in the late 90s). WebTVs suck. But that's not because we don't like integrating things together, it's because the integration is done bass-ackward: you don't stick all the popular features of your general-purpose device as special modes of your single-feature device, you add that single feature as an application on your general purpose device!
I would love a small palmtop computer, provided that it is genuinely a real, general-purpose computer, i.e. you could run Linux on it without fancy hacking, besides the software porting needed; you could write new applications for it and install them, organize files on it however you damn well please, hook it up via standard connections (Ethernet, USB, Firewire, whatever) to any other device and make them talk like you would with a computer. I would like to have PIM software (address/calendar/etc), email, text and voice chat, web, and video apps on it, little games, and what have you. But failing that, I'd rather have a phone that's just a damn phone than a phone that also pretends to be all of these other things, often poorly.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Ah, I see the Apple fanboys are finally starting to come out in force. Wonder what took them so long, usually an anti-Apple comment would be at -1 by now. I'm still wondering if the "Redundant" mod was honest because others mentioned the monopoly effect already, or an Apple fanboy just wanted his zealous down-mod to look legit.
And yes, just for reference, I have used Mac OS, from version 7 all the way to X. I've also programmed for them, and on both counts, I would have to recommend looking elsewhere. Hence my signature.
Nathan's blog
You dismiss geography, but that's only part of it. The math doesn't have to do just with geography or number of subscribers, but a combination of the two: United States: 302.44 million people / 9.16 million square kilometers = 33.02 people per square kilometer. Japan: 127.76 million people / 0.37 million square kilometers = 345.30 people per square kilometer That's a big difference. Now imagine an average monthly subscription price of 50 duckets. United States: 1,651 duckets per square kilometer Japan: 17,265 duckets per square kilometer Imagine how those numbers might affect the quality of the infrastructure in the US vs Japan. Even in populated areas, Japanese cities maintain a much higher average population density than US cities. Think of this in terms of duckets per area of land and you'll see an explanation for the current state of not only our cell network, but our public transit systems and more. I'm a regular visitor to Japan and South Korea, two countries with some of the best mobile technology worldwide.
The main reason you see all of the "new" phones in both Asia and Europe is really quite simple. It is a matter of economic scale. Since the rest of the world is basically on one type of network and the good old USA is a hogpog of networks, the rest of the world is a bigger market.
Who in there right mind would bring a phone into the US market and then have to decide do I go with Sprint and the PCS network or AT%T or someone else. Or do I go and make the phone available in Europe and Asia and not have to worry about which network to support. It seems a no brainer question to me...
Answer is here http://teaminfinity.com/robo_wageless_lofs
Mac makes great stuff, no question, alas this is not the point. The point is that America is a land of fools.
When you have so many fools, there can be no competition. Consider it this way, the shrewder you are, the better it is more everyone else. On the other hand, the more foolishly you spend your money, the higher prices will go until it hits a limit, and all the smart people will be treated just as crappy as everyone else since there are still enough fools around to make ripping everyone off still make CENTS. And for those of you who feel everything is just fine, this is because you are part of the interlocking triumvirate and benefit from the "way things are" at others expense. This works for awhile until there is nothing left to "steal" and those being stolen from have nothing left to give. This is the beginnings of ALL WARS.
There is an oligarchy of business concerns in America who have jointly set up this rat race, commandeered the government's regulatory prerogative, and are running 96.34523 +/- % of the populace ragged. These business concerns have even started to inhale its citizens into the meat grinder of war. For the answer to these issues: visit: http://teaminfinity.com/robo_wageless_lofs and for pete's sake, share YOUR thoughts with us and others re: the NO BRAINER solution ROBOTICS and the WAGELESS ECONOMY offers, and how we should demand our "leaders", asleep at the wheel of destiny lining their own pockets, to FASTTRACK the ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY TODAY !!! Thanks for your time and helping yourself so everyone can WIN !!
The Future is already here, just unevenly distributed... THE ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY NOW! http://RoboEco.com/slash
They did it ages ago.. with my phone if I'm near a hotspot I can make free calls and free sms via truphone... and it's all automatic too.
I think we're back to what the article is about.. the US is so far behind you're hoping for things in the future that we've been using for a while now.
We just need to pump more Java into our phones. If the Java apps don't help the market, then it's the programmers' faults.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2007/07/1 0/PM200707102.html
The majority of Americans don't really care if they are getting a good deal or not when it comes to tech, especially not the ever lucrative teenage girl market. They know consumers will buy anything as long as it is percieved to be cool and the best - consider the success of he RAZR, a fairly banal phone at best. Even phones with great features are saddled with lousy interfaces to give end users familiarity, not because its better but because that is what sells.
Short answer: the American marketplace pays little attention to quality, and besides - its not like most Americans even care or keep up with there's of the world. Its a symptom of a much larger problem.
DISCLAIMER: posted by a white male American from an iPhone.
It costs a couple of orders of magnitude more to upgrade a system as large as the US cellular system than it does to upgrade Japan (a system about the size of California). Added to this is the fact that many million of people simply want a phone. They can give a rat's ass about features, and probably don't care much about text messaging either. Your need doesn't make a compelling market, after all in six months you'll just want something else.
Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
Although I doubt when it's released this fall it will be perfect, it sure sounds like one of those disruptive technologies a few of you are talking about. Considering it is only the first planned device of what I hope will be many open phone devices, how long will the Telco's of Canada and the U.S. be able to play stupid before it starts to really hurt the bottom line?
In B.C., our fascism is green.
I actually work for a major US wireless carrier, in the department that handles data content and services. I'm not equipped to defend every decision or offering that the carriers have made over the years. However, reading through most of the comments, there is one point I haven't seen made yet...
In the US, when a customer buys a device + service plan, a certain business relationship is formed between user and carrier, and most Americans tend to associate their carrier to everything about their phone. Therefore, if something breaks, whether it was the fault of the carrier or the phone manufacturer or the developer of the application... the customer always calls the carrier first! To put it another way, the carrier always takes the blame. Reread some of the posts above, you'll see what I mean.
I don't know about the other carriers, but this one therefore spends A LOT of time testing handsets and certifying applications. If there is a particular feature that can't be certified, it will probably be "locked down." Not because there is a desire to hamstring the customer, but because the customer will get pissed when it breaks. And the carrier gets to clean up the mess.
I live in a post-soviet union country (Lithuania) altho it's been only 17 years of independency, people here don't know how can there be now coverage. Phones sell unlocked, with contract or without it. You can walk into any providers office and buy w/e phone you like and use it with any other provider. The rates are fiercly cheap (7 $ cents for a minute and 4 for a text). Beat that US
I have always been amazed at how many different models of phones are out there that we cannot even touch here in the U.S. Nokia has many different models available at any one time but only about 4 or 5 are available from your carrier if you are lucky. Same for Motorola and all other cell phone manufacturers. As an example, last year I bought a Motorola V3X off E-Bay. It is a great phone (far better than any RAZR V3 or spinoff) but is missing the 850 MHz band, which AT&T uses heavily. Every phone Motorola sells in the U.S. is a quad-band phone that works anywhere in the world. My phone works great in my current region but may not get a signal elsewhere. AT&T came out with the V3XX this year, which is mostly comparable but the camera is 1.3 Megapixel vs. the 2 Megapixel camera in my V3X.
Ever since the first RAZR came out, every phone you can buy has been a version of the RAZR. Even the latest RAZR V3 is not any different than the V3 of a couple of years ago. Almost everything offered is a clam-shell whether you like that design or not. I have seen far better phones offered by the manufacturers but the carriers do not support them. They have an extremely narrow-minded view of what they think their customers want and that is all they sell. The seldom offer phones that are outside the accepted standard. Sometimes you can get something better on E-Bay or some other store and hope they work with your provider's network.
Greed. Corporate greed. Americans are far too complacent and subservient to their corporate masters to EVER object.
I was fully weaned off of TV as well, but when my son came along, I had to figure-out how to entertaign myself while I was rocking him to sleep. This got me back in the TV habit.
In Hell:
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
George Carlin has the answer: America bends over, and corporations Service Their Account.
What's keeping consumer internet bandwidth at 1/10 the speed of countries? Same answer.
They own the wires. Without free spectrum, it's game over.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
iMate's "Jasjam" phone spanks the living daylights out of the iPhone.
:P
Oh, but that's right, it's not available in the USA.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
I lived in Japan for awhile, and the difference is, in part, cultural. Japanese people are technology crazy, by our standards. It's not a stereotype. They use their cell phones for everything. Often, students at the college I attended didn't own computers, but used their cell phones for e-mail, web browsing, etc. On trains, text messaging is all the rage. People do it constantly. Recently, full novels have been distributed over cell phone networks. The cell phone has become "the" device there. I visited Matsushita headquarters (Panasonic) back in 2004. While there, they showed technology which allowed cell phones to be used to control every thing from house security systems to air conditioning. Americans are just much slower when it comes to adopting new technology. They'll think it's "cheesy" or "unnecessary." Often, one will hear things like, "We don't need all of those features." The Japanese eat it up. I do think that the iPhone will spawn a new generation of American devices, which will, one hopes, help us to catch up to the Japanese, in terms of what is expected on a cell phone.
1.Lack of competition in the US cellphone market, mostly thanks to the way the FCC divided up spectrum geographically so you end up with Sprint Nextel having the best coverage in one area, Verizon having the best coverage in another area, and AT&T having the best coverage in another area with no-one being able to obtain enough spectrum in the other guys areas to actually compete with them. Here in australia you have a choice of 4 different operators (Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and "3") and all of them are fiercely competitive with each other for business.
2.Flawed pricing structures for the service. If they did what carriers in Australia do and actually charged you for the data you transfered over GPRS/EDGE/3G/etc they wouldn't need to stop you using it for anything usefull...
Offering Unlimited* data (*we reserve the right to cut you off if you use it for anything more than checking your email once in a blue moon) is a BIG part of the problem. Change the business model so that people using lots of mobile data is actually PROFITABLE for the phone company and things would be better.
3.FUD from the carriers like "Allowing unsigned JAVA apps to make TCP/IP connections is a security risk to our network" (you can bet that if there was a way to legally ban the FIC Neo OpenMoko phone from their network, AT&T would do it)
4.Lack of innovation in cellphone designs. Where (for example) is the cellphone built specifically to be rugged enough for use by people who toss their phones about a lot? (e.g. people on a construction site) Where (for example) is the cellphone with no confusing features, really large buttons and really large screen aimed at older people or people with vision or fine motor disabilities? Where (for example) are the cellphones that have all the features of current top of the line phones EXCEPT for the camera. Something for the people who visit sites where cameras and camera phones are banned.
Most of the cellphones out (e.g. RAZR, Chocolate and other new fancy phones from other carriers are all about
Personally, I find the whole cell phone thing amusing more than anything else. Maybe I'm just getting old and not the gadget geek I used to be. My cousin is on maybe his 3rd or 4th phone in 2 years. I bought one 3 years ago with NO extras and it's all I need.
I don't get it. It's a phone. That's all I want from it. I don't want to take pictures, browse the web, send e-mail or anything else. That's what cameras and computers are for. I don't need a phone that can brew beer and drive my car.
I'm going back to college part-time and it amazes me how much the kids today are absolutely hooked on their phones. They may as well just have them surgically attached to the sides of their heads. Want to know why kids aren't getting an education? Because they're not paying attention to the teachers, they're texting each other. I'm sick of seeing every driver around me with a phone to their head. For God's sake people, hang up and drive already.
I know some people actually can improve their productivity with a phone with lots of features, but for a lot of people it just seems to be a waste. A waste of their money and a waste of God knows how much time dicking around with their toys. It's great to be social and all, but being social has a time and place. A classroom, in line next to me at the bank/grocery store/wherever, driving in traffic, these are not appropriate times. I don't want to hear your conversation and I don't want to die because you're so busy talking on the phone you didn't notice the red light.
Call me a troll, but I think the world has gone cell phone insane.
Telecom in New Zealand: you reckon the US has it bad? You should come down here for a while. Telecommunications in this country are a sick joke. 20 cents per text, something like $1.69 per minute for peak calling for prepay. And don't even ask about broadband.
Karma? Sorry, i don't believe in superstition. http://talk.thinkingmatters.org.nz
See http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/statistics/indicators/ 32.html for a better set of median oncome numbers.
The US has the highest portion of households (17.0) below the povery level of all advanced countries. Compare to the UK (12.4), France (8.0), Sweden (6.5), etc.
It is interesting for you to call his article a troll when you prove his point in your second statement. I quote:
That was precisely his point: Why is it that no phone with functionality rivalling the iPhone was available until now? Why is it that these phones have been available in Japan for years?
In his article, he was not comparing his phone for the sake of saying "My phone is better than your phone", he was pointing out that people waited in line all night to get functionality that has been available in Japan for nearly a decade and in the rest of the world for a few years. Who cares if the Casio phone has a touchscreen? The question is: does it allow you to do all or most of the things the iPhone does? It does not have to allow you to do those things in the same way.
So, you are saying the US phone market does not suck because the iPhone has Safari. If that is not a red herring, we might as well choose another color. The argument also assumes that Safari is definitively better than Opera which is arguable at best.
I certainly hope you are right, but I doubt it very much. Linux has a shell, too, and Motorola has been entirely successful in making it difficult or impossible to get access to it on their Linux phones. Apple will certainly behave similarly. Also, only people with a lot of cash and a need to show off buy iPhones, so the majority of its userbase are not geeks but yuppies. As you are probably aware, yuppies are about as intelligent as cattle and will doubtless be able to do little more than make calls with their iPhones.
Vendor lockin is precisely what it is. I have been listening to mp3s on my phones for the last 4 years or so. Has the iPhone or even iTunes been available that long? My phone also has a USB port and mounts as a hard drive on any computer with zero software installation, so I can play or move my music to or from anyone's computer. Neither the Casio nor the iPhone can do that.
But that is not the point. The point is that iTunes is not a standard. It is proprietary. Mp3s work with everything And please do not argue that iTunes audio tracks somehow sound better than mp3s.
So, in the end, your argument is just a defense of the iPhone per se, and not a reasonable defense of the cellphone market in the US. In the end, it is your post that is both off topic and a troll.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Do you check your email from your laptop in the subway, while walking in the city, in a supermarket, at a concert? Would you really carry it around when you go out at night to be able to check out directions using GPS when you get lost?
Maybe it is partially related to the fact that Japanese use public transportation a lot; it's obviously hard to browse the web no matter what device you have if you're driving (since the majority of US citizens drive, alone in their cars). But still, a keitai is a very convenient internet device for daily use, and that's why Japanese use them so much.
I wish that when I come back to Europe, I could get a phone without all the useless features (bad camera, polyphonic ringtones, etc) but with which I could browse the web for free and send regular emails from my phone instead of expensive 250 char-long SMSes (or even more expensive MMS).
Japanese phones don't really do much magic; they just do what I (and possibly many other people here) find useful much better than US/European phones.
theefer
c'mon, this is slashdot, it has to be microsofts fault...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
1. The US consumer does not know the true value of a phone. Most of our phones are heavily subsidized, so most people in the US expect phones to come in at $29.99, $59.99, or $99.99. The true cost is hidden due to those stupid lock-in contracts. iPhone is at least helping to change the value problem as they refused to let ATT subsidize the phone. Amazingly though, we still got locked into contracts. Anyway, since most people refuse to pay more than $100 (except for tech-sophisticated Slashdot readers), there is no incentive for the carrier to offer a broader range of higher-end phones if they can't get the volume behind it.
2. The carriers place so many requirements on the phones that manufacturers almost have to customize the full-phone to meet their needs. This is expensive work that makes phone development more difficult. A company cannot afford to customize ALL their phones to a particular carrier without damaging their business in other parts of the world. I love the UIs on some phones, but I never see them at VZW because VZW requires manufacturers to do it their way. I believe Nokia tried to fight this with them, but it looks like even they've lost.
3. The people buying the phones are your Grandpa and Grandma. They have no clue who you are and what makes you different. There are a lot of really "kickin'" phones in the world, but Grandpa likes the boring old silver ones. The RAZR and iPhone are extreme outliers caused by ATT willing to take a risk and make VZW look bad.
4. Carriers don't want to hold inventory on hundreds of models, and trust me, there are hundreds of models out there. They need to keep their costs low and they partially do this by managing their inventory carefully. Carrying 75 phones in your store is not effective.
5. They could just let you use unlocked phones, but they don't want the "revenue leakage". Opening the market to new phones means you might get to load up music you already own on our phone (Sony-Ericcson phones) or use Wi-Fi to surf the web at Starbucks (Nokia N95). Reducing their SKUs allows them to better control how you get content to the phone.
Honestly, we should all be calling our congressmen complaining about these practices. The technological sophistication of the mobile phone market in the US is falling way behind the rest of the world. They are seriously laughing at us and why we put up with this.
Just saying...
:)
What's the closest thing to a tricorder that you can buy?
I think I paid JPY9800 for it, with a different AU plan than the original poster, I presume. I agree it's generally a good phone, but it locks you in just as badly as some of the US phones. My Sony Ericsson T67 (? shoot, I don't remember the exact model) let me use bluetooth to copy MIDI files over to it and use them as ring tones.
As far as I can tell, the W41CA has no way to transfer any kind of audio files to it other than the one supported by their proprietary (and buggy) software. Furthermore, bluetooth is just not catching on in Japan, so syncing contacts is a tedious affair involving the USB cradle and their proprietary software (and only if you have Japanese Windows... Linux/Mac users need not apply).
Also, most Japanese phones don't have input assistance for English text (e.g. T9), so it's tedious to write messages.
I actually don't use the internet features very much, so if I had the choice of somehow using my Sony Ericsson in Japan or the W41CA, I'd ratehr have my Sony Ericcson (assuming hypothetical Japanese input support).
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
This is a little off-topic, but maybe the info is revealing:
.... ) she handed us three of these little charms. They were in the shape of little Taiwan Beer bottles, just less than half of your index finger in length.
I was in a pub in Taiwan last week, and the Taiwan Beer Girl came by, handing out promotional items. One thing very popular in Asia from my view is little cell phone charms. For ordering a Taiwan Beer (which I highly recommend
The point? They have green and red LEDs inside that are RF sensitive and they light up when your phone rings - even if on ring-mute.
RF detectors for your cell phone to show activity - free at a local bar. I tried to explain the state of things back home on our cell phone capabilities - they flatly refused to believe that these little charms aren't being handed out for free in our bars, much less what we go through for contract details, etc. I'm still amazed.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
Whatever
...at the au service and ARPU stood at JPY 6,150, up 5.6 percent year-on-year."
For AT&T's latest quarterly results, "Wireless service average revenue per user, or Arpu, rose 3.6% to $50.63"
"Japanese operator KDDI saw its operating profit rise more than 15 percent in the first quarter...
AT&T results
KDDI results
You care to try and explain this? $50.63 is almost exactly 6150¥. I was using KDDI in Japan. I was a Cingular customer back in the states. What give?
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
The only way to change what US providers offer is to use your dollars. I've started to do that recently, and it's a great feeling.
/.'ers want, but I still think it was a great deal for something I'll use for 2-3 years.
First, buy your own, GSM, unlocked phone. I bought my most-recent quad-band dream phone from Amazon for $200. Admittedly, my dream phone is a lot simpler than what most
Second, reject the contract. For GSM providers, you can get a new plan without a contract if you don't buy a phone and if you badger the salespeople enough.
Third, keep track of your monthly usage, and change your plan at least 2-3 times a year to fit the services you actually use. You can do that without a contract, and it will save you a lot of money.
As an American, I can't tell you how liberating cell phone freedom feels. The Europeans may laugh, but being able to just walk into any store, buy a SIM card and thereby change my provider is incredible to me. Or being able to just switch my plan to prepaid when I go overseas, then switch it back when I return. On my most recent trip to Beijing, I walked into a China Mobile store, bought a SIM card and prepaid plan for about $30, and was using my own phone in China in less than 5 minutes.
That's a powerful thing for a consumer to do. And it's why I reluctantly refuse to buy an iPhone until I can get one that's unlocked.
Another interesting data point: people here in China are so aggressive about shopping for the best deal on mobile service that you can now buy a single phone handset that takes TWO SIM cards. There are separate "call" buttons, one for each line. All of the phone's functions can be routed over either network, and you can change that on the fly if necessary. So you can have one provider for international calls and another for local, or buy a cheap text messaging package from one provider and use the other for voice.
First, the US regulators are in the pocket of big industry. The parent implied it, but I'm saying it - US cell phones and broadband suck because the people have allowed government to be coopted by big business so no one can enter the market.
Second the iPhone isn't just a phone. Yes, it makes calls. And yes, those other phones nominally do all those things. That's not why people buy a Mac, an iPod, or now an iPhone. There were MP3 players BEFORE the iPod... and they're cheaper. But the iPod seems better to use, nicer, more friendly, so people buy it. I have PC laptops that are definitely faster - but not as nice to use - as my older OS X one.
The iPhone is the coolest phone, for totally nontechnical reasons. And the coolest PDA. And the coolest micro-web browser. Maybe it's not even all of these things... but it's close, to a lot of people.
So you point about the cellphone market - and the broadband market - while completely true, is absolutely not the basis for the iPhone's success. The iPhone is successful on the Apple name and the Apple history of making things work NICELY.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
China is the place for mobile phones. Thousands of different models to choose from - every feature under the sun and no contracts. You buy the phone ($30 to several hundred dollars depending on what you want) pay about $16 US for a simcard and a month of credit - and you top it up every month with another $8-$10 US - usually plenty. No wonder half of all the mobiles in the world are here - everyone over 8 years old seems to have one. Cameras, net browsers, MP3 players, PDA's, translators, etc are everywhere. Same system applies to dial up web access, no ISP's, just dial your local number, a small fee will be charged to it as you browse...
i'll let you guys and girls debate the reasons behind all this. frankly, i'm more interested in why the phone (W1C4A <-- actually wikipedia.org) mentioned by the original poster has a button that says "hot" at the bottom, and a plate that says "win" on the outside shell.
anyone? will pushing the "hot" button heat up the phone to warm my hand(s) on a cold day? does the "win" plate somehow enable me to keep my perfect solitaire win record?
anyone?
not only is time travel possible, it's irrelevant.
Look, it is really very, very simple. The American phone market has been completely locked up and stagnated by patents. Innovation has stalled, and we will continue to slide behind the rest of the world as a result.
I have to AC this otherwise you morons would blast me to oblivion.
We are talking about a phone. What does a phone do? Lets you talk to people.
If you fucking idiots can't go 2 seconds without checking your email, SMSing someone for whatever fucked up reason, and need to take pictures of dogs peeing on fire hydrants to show your friends, then ah hell who knows.
Oh wait, we need voice activation, a calendar (your brain is so much mush you can't even remember your damn schedule?), a f'n calculator (yes, Sparky, 2 + 2 still equals 4), and whatever the fuck you just "can't live with out?"
You are either a useless PHB or some absolute total "Look at me! I'm so cool I can video myself checking my calendar while MMSing a dog peeing on a fire hydrant" pleab you should pay taxes to breath.
Oooh, my friend bought tickets in 1 minute for the next train. Ooh, in Japan the phones give you a free enema. Ooh, in Europe you can go to another country and still use your phone (for the record going to another country in Europe is like going to another state in the US).
Let's see did I miss anything? Oh yeah, we can listen to music and watch movies! Forbid if we would actually read something! Don't forget those super-phones take have all the attachments that let you suck your dick or tickle the pink parts on the ladies!
I've seen more masturbation over phones on slashdot than a good dozen Playboys. No wonder you people are so fucking insane. Shit, at lest buy a russian bride so you can pretend. Buy a frisbee so you can teach a hamster to fetch (no, a dog would outwit you).
Shit, most of you make the "so dumb editors can't even catch dupes" look like utter geniuses.
FUCK!
I think there are lots of people on the list searching for a singular reason for what is keeping the US in the wireless stone age. Problem is that I just don't know there is one reason. Its likely a combination of many things that have already been mentioned on this list.
The US has enjoyed a very rich wireline service for a lot longer than most countries. The wireline business is being cannibalized by the wireless business to such an extent they companies here are looking to both media and wireless to offset the losses in the wireline space. That wireline business historically was very profitable. When under pressure by wallstreet to continue showing growth telcos had to do something to put up the numbers. So the free market idea is partly to blame for much of the consolidation that occurs in any market where a company has achieved maximum saturation. How do you show growth when you reach a point of flat or negative churn? You buy up things which provide synergy such as wireless and media.
Second for this has been the massive proliferation of wireline in its own right. That infrastructure is huge, and expensive. It was expensive to deploy many moons ago, and it continues to be expensive to service today...in spite of the declining user base. Problem is that people still expect that system to work. So part of the problem here again is the need for wireless and media to assist telco with its wireline "going out of business" model. So first part was to show profit and subscriber growth. The statements I've just made have much more to do with expenses.
Third is that we don't have a single standard in the US for wireless. This provides a few problems. The first is the duplication of infrastructure, that occurs at varying costs. The second is the cost for research and development. The Telco's here aren't pushing you the phone so much as they are the network. And because they are trying to differentiate themselves on that basis the costs associated with deploying rival technologies does nothing but double that effort. Where countries with single technologies for wireless have a benefit in all R/D going into differentiation by feature set, the US wireless model's main differentiator has much more to do with the network itself.
A forth problem has nothing to do with the technology IMHO. Consider a few decades ago when somebody actually worked at a company for their entire career. Those people retired. Before there were 401k and HMOs these employees enjoyed things like pensions and full health benefits. Those employees are now reaching an age where those costs are chiming in heavy. While this will work itself out due to life expectancy the cost of health and living in the US isn't exactly declining. Any of the larger companies in the US have this problem, but few of them employed as many people as the telcos did.
After divestiture another problem hit telco. Anybody was allowed to sell long distance, and by government law telcos had to offer the service to these providers at a discount which was regulated. This really put a hurting on things because it effectively cannibalized them of the very market that was making any money at all. On top of that you had all this cost tied up in the call detail record processing so they could figure out how much to charge each other from user to user, for all the switching and network load in between. Do you guys have any idea how much computing capacity it takes to process this stuff? I divulge a bit from a former life. 135,000 Mips of mainframe, 30,000 nodes of open systems, Petabytes upon Petabytes to bill it all out. People talk about Storage Area Networks. How does 30,000 san ports and counting strike you? I can't even venture to guess the cost of the electric bill on that kind of buildout. Lots of IT guys here are familiar with the concept of your computer vendors coming in to collect their yearly maintenance true-up...which is operating expense by the way. And this is just to support that old fashioned wireline busine
I lived in Japan a few years back and had this very same question. I did some asking around and the simple answer is: it's all about the network. There are more customers per square mile (kilometer), meaning more bang for the buck in terms of network maintenance. More money is left for R and D.
In addition, Japanese cell companies stick smaller cell reception hubs (I hesitate to call them towers) in the back of vending machines, making the network stronger. This allows for less battery usage for phone calls making the phone smaller or diverting the battery power to new technologies that are yet to be made efficient.
The US simple has too many people spread out to be on the cutting edge of cell phone technology.
The author infers that his current phone is feature-compatible with, or superior to, the iPhone.
Look, I've used phones from all over the world in my job. THERE IS NOTHING LIKE THE IPHONE.
Lots of MP3 players claim to have the same -- or better -- feature set than an iPod. None of those players -- not one -- can crack 5% marketshare.
ITS THE INTERFACE STUPID.
The author's larger point -- that US phones lag seriously behind non-US phones -- is valid, but don't even TRY to diss the iPhone to make your point. Yeah, other phones do a lot of cool stuff, but there is NOTHING like the iPhone out there, and it's interface WILL cause/is already causing a revolution both here and abroad. Bet on it.
If you think US Phones are still in the Stone Age, you should check my country! We have the highest cellphone plan rates in the whole world,also with no special services and cool tech advancements...and still you see everybody carrying a cellphone!
"Everything else is just stuff to distract you from the fact that your phone network quality suddenly degraded to 3rd world levels." 3rd world levels obviously don't apply here in Africa - you'll have a difficult time finding anyone who has ever had a dropped call or had anything but crystal clear voice quality. Networks are GSM with Edge/3G/HSDPA in urban areas, and coverage is generally excellent even in rural areas. As the vast majority of africans are poor, there is a big market here for pre-paid contracts. Buy a cheap phone one-off (new or second-hand, they're mostly network-unlocked) and get a sim card for your mobile number. You then load blocks of credit onto your sim card and pay $0.10-$0.20 per minute for calls. Contracts are never longer than 2 years and you get a free brand new phone of your choice every 20 months, free minutes and data rates of about $0.14/MB). And yes the networks are making massive profits. I think part of the problem in the US is that they were one of the first countries with a cell network, and therefore they're now stuck with a huge infrastructure of old technology that is too expensive to upgrade to take advantage of newer phones. But that still doesn't explain why Americans are willing to pay to *receive* a text message, or how anyone can be happy with a network that doesn't support basic stuff like Wap Push requests.
This supply and demand argument cannot be more false. The fact is that monopoly economics are the only thing that can explain the US cell phone market. Considering the high prices, lack of choices, lack of feature competition, lack of service competition, and lack of coverage, anyone who argues supply and demand in the US cellphone market ought to have their head examined.
Let me list several types of vendor lockin in the US:
Handsets are locked to specific service providers. When one changes service, one cannot transfer an old phone to a new service provider, even when the provider offers compatible network. Even the iPhone which works on GSM networks is not a true GSM phone. It does not have a SIM card and cannot be used with any other service provider.
By not having a standard network like the rest of the world, the service providers all have different incompatible hardware. This means two things: a) a duplication of effort, like many cell towers using different technology covering the same area, and b) degraded coverage. b) becomes an issue when you think of ubiquity. Subways, for instance, are underground and cannot have ten cell network's infrastructure built into them. If all the cell networks ran GSM or some other standard architecture, one set of transmitters would work for all service providers. This standardization would also eliminate spotty coverage that is so frequently experienced in US cities. Handsets also, even when unlocked, do not work on different network architectures, so they are essentially locked anyway.
Because phones are bought by the service providers and not the customers themselves, the choice of which phones are likely to be most popular is made by market research, not the actual public. This limitation is HUGE. In other parts of the world, there are magazines that review literally tens or hundreds of phones every month! (with feature comparison charts at the back). I can go to any of thousands of stores and buy a phone without having to buy service, and, better yet, I know for a fact that my phone will work. This is not possible in the US. Conclusion: since service providers are choosing phone features, the public is not, and supply and demand is absent.
Another obvious pointer to the monopolistic nature of the US cellphone market is that teenagers are not driving the market. Some time way back in the 80s, some genius at some service provider got the notion that business customers were the people to market cell phones to. Let's face it. Business customers suck compared to teenagers. They are stingy, they keep their phones forever, they do not spend much time talking, and they worry about high phone bills. This is why all the payment plans in the US have prepaid blocks. In Japan, by comparison, the market is driven by teenages who have to have new phones every six months and rack up tons of money in bills to talk to their latest acquaintances. Anybody who has fought with a sibling over the phone in the house would appreciate the social pressure to talk on phones a lot here. However, the vendors just do not get it, and US customers are paying for the vendors' decision.
In the rest of the world, cellphone handset prices have dropped rapidly. I have watched a cellphone go from US$700 to less than US$300 in less than 6 months -- by which time it is often replaced by a newer version at near half the price of the older model. This is in the absence of the service provider subsidy. This subsidy is available any time I purchase service for any new device I wish to purchase whether or not the service provider is selling it. In the US, I could not look to other vendors for a particular phone because the vendor is the service provider, and no other phones will work with the provider's network.
. . . There are probably quite a few more I have not thought of at the moment, but that fairly well demonstrates the situation US customers are in.
Do you still believe that the market in the US is driven by supply and demand?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
The parent thinks that the telecommunications market in the U.S. is free. What a joke. It is one of the most tampered with and over regulated industries in the whole country. Hardly an example of "too free a market".
Creative Demolition
A huge difference between California/Bay Area and Sweden, where I live, is the huge amount of operator stores. Sometimes it feels like there is an operator store in each and every minor shopping center. There's got to be a cost involved running all those stores.
Is this situation the same other parts of the US too?
Also I would suspect that marketing (of which many companies in the US are doing quite a bit of) costs may inhibit progress/development due to the sheer amount of money consumed.
Unlocking is legal in most of the EU. In denmark where I come from the carries is required by law to unlock their phones for free after 6 months.
Visit http://www.crunzh.com/ for free software. Mac/Lin/Win
every where else i have been has used sim cards (the easily removable type), they allow you to change phones when ever you like and keep your same number and contacts and even sms's !
Well, yes - 20-yr-old marketing "geniuses" seem to think that the rest of us want to surf the Web on a 1.5"x2" screen; that we want to text message everyone due to being afraid to talk to people, and play games on a screen smaller than a pack of cards.
On the other hand, it's allegedly the 21st Century: why do we have *exactly* the same frequency response on phone microphones and speakers that our parents had 60 years ago? Why can't we get more than 400 to 2000 or so Hz?
mark
Brilliant!
The American market for ANY consumer goods works on a model of "do the least cost highest return" model.
The SIM chip design was supposed to make it EASY to change phone providers, but the providers have made it nearly impossible to transfer from one company to another--binding customers to their choice, and making it expensive to change.
Effectively, there is little or no competition between companies.
Cable TV is run similarly, since it is usually a city granted monopoly, cable companies have no competition--no city is going to lightly transfer to a new company.
In both of these cases, the companies offer insipid "packages" of service which are irrelevant to what a consumer actually wants or needs. In both instances the companies insist that "there is no demand" for a la cart service.
Of course, this is the same model followed by US politics, where they have convinced the people that "the us is a 2 party system," which it is not, and that we are a "democracy" which we never have been, (and hopefully never will be.) I dare you to define a true difference between a Democrat and a Republican.
This pattern is capable of being maintained simply because it is such a large country, effectively (even before NAFTA) NA was all one market, and is separate from the rest of the world.
The "we're the phone company, we don't care because we don't have to," mindset is still very strong in all consumer marketing.
Slowly (because the companies work very hard to keep the market closed,) this is beginning to change, as more people travel abroad for longer periods and can compare what exists elsewhere with what they are offered, but it is a very slow process.
Meanwhile, we're offered expensive, poorly designed, antique consumer goods without knowing that there are better alternatives elsewhere. Why should the marketers sell products that do more and cost less and last longer if they can ensure themselves of high profits for shoddy merchandise and repeat buyers?
Perhaps now that IKEA has begun to break into the US market there will be some real competition, but it will take at least another decade. There are still many people like my father (who didn't want me buying a Subaru because it "is a foreign car and parts will be expensive." Of course, my Subaru was made in Indiana....)
Most home appliances in the US have made only cosmetic changes in the past 50 years--few real improvements in anything from toasters to stoves to refrigerators. The same goes for built in stuff like toilets, water heaters, furnaces etc.. When there have been improvements, they are usually 10 year old designers from Europe or Asia--and some of them are not real improvements, just different looking.
As a rule, US manufacturers will not listen to any customer ideas for improvements--claiming fear of lawsuit--even when said idea is presented with a legal statement GIVING them the idea.
Since most of them seem incapable of generating any NEW ideas of their own, I can see their point, but the result is that customers suffer.
I suspect that it will change only when people start looking further afield for devices which work, offer REAL features (not just 8 different colors!) and which are designed to function for dcades rather than months.
Look at the Consumer Reports(tm) analysis' of the "top selling" US cars and you will find that NONE of them rank well on maintenance, reliability, comfort etc.. There are literally millions of US residents who by a particular brand of vehicle simply because "my father and grandfather always did." Mind you that Grandpa made the original decisions based upon analysis of what was available--not because the family "always did it that way."
In the '40's over 90% of hot water in Orange County CA was solar heated. A decade later 90% was gas. Was gas cheaper? No. But the gas companies offered a "free" water heater, all you paid for was the gas--suckers.
Part of this is that the vast majority of people here are not taught to lo
My phone vibrates.
like mp3s did to the music industry the phone companies need a real kick in the teeth to set them straight that they are to SERVE us and not exploit us for money. what's your company doing FOR you? for their earnings and profits ya but for us? usually f*ck all.
/w wireless)
:)
p2p phone service would be the next step in the evolution of our phones.
voip services enable 24-7 phone usage for a flat rate. having a wireless (modified for increased range) router could mean p2p phone service. the bandwidth is not all that much.
rockbox.org has firmware for ipods and other portable media players. if a company/org did the same for all the phones so they would be unlocked and have full features inc auto switching to free networks (bouncing over landlines
bit torrent really helped the net move files w/o bandwidth problems. if each phone could also send and receive other people's calls to bounce them forward (perhaps built into free calling could be like bit torrent where it forces you to share)
hope this helps somewhere way smarter then me (and then me down the line when i turn my phone into a p2p phone)
Only one of the 4 cell phone providers in my area gives me a useable signal both at home and at work.
Without the 2nd Amendment, the others are just suggestions.
People and companies here in the EU or over there in the US are used to being rather lazy (I'm certainly a good example myself). Less work means a lower general level of competition, which means that you can charge more money for lower quality of goods and services. Japan and South Korea will probably charge ahead of us for another generation before they too develop the same kind of lazyness cultures that we have in the western world. It will even itself out. We just have to wait 30 years. Or stop being lazy (as if).
MOD PARENT UP.
He is right on the money with this statement. The grandparent is an asshole and at the end of the day just an ignorant drone.
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
There is only a handful of major mobile phone operators, it's hard to switch, and they have you on long-term contracts anyway.
The solution to this is simple: prohibit long-term contracts, prohibit locked phones, and require all operators to standardize on a single mobile phone system.
I love cool gadgets. I bought iomega's Jaz drive system as well as a couple of Sony minidisc Walkmans, not to mention a half dozen mp3 players of dubious distinction. I'm personally gun shy when it comes to proprietory technology. The way the phones are marketed in the US is completely against the fabric of my being. Phone features included by the phone manufacturer are locked out and the networks are frequently vicious about preventing new software being added to "their" phones. Add to this the fact that I'm not interested in entering into expensive and draconian long-term contracts with these companies, and I'm still carrying around my dinky Siemens CF-62T which works under my 10 cents for everything pay-as-you-go "plan". From a consumer perspective, the US market is broken for both devices and service and the only reason it persists that I can see is that people keep buying into it, meaning the networks keep making lots of money. IF and when phones become widely sold unlocked and the networks are finally forced to compete on quality of service and pricing of plans, things will change dramatically. Meantime, I'll keep shaking my head at reading the full-page newspaper ads that tell me about how many pitiful phones I could get "free" with an asterisk to the tiny print about the 2 year contract required that charges at least twice as much as a land line, extra money for text messages, and hundreds of dollars to cancel early. Folks, please stop feeding the beast...
While Europe and other markets use GSM, the US market started up using CDMA.
Much of the phone innovation has come from European and Asian companies and these have usually been GSM phones.
Incorrect. Americans do not know that we get shafted by Cellphone company collusion to keep prices high.
Your neighbors to the north get real screwed. CRTC big boys club keeps prices double that of the USA.
Jitterbug
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Enjoy,
FifthE1ement
"The relationship between what we see and what we know is never settled..."
The reason the phone companies charge for ring tones is because they are copyrighted and the publishing industry (very closely related to the RIAA) are able to charge what they want for the rights to those specific songs.
Libertas in infinitum
The simple answer is that we don't spend that much time on our phones compared to the Japanese and their keitai denwas.
One reason is because we have PCs. Huh? Japanese homes are usually small apartments with little room for something like a full-size AlienWare box, so that's why they prefer tiny laptops. Even offices generally are crunched to laptop room only. So what's the mostly reliable way to contact friends anywhere, lookup information, find your way along the unlabeled streets in this environment? Texting. What supports that? keitais. Notice SMS took off rest of the world whereas IM and email took off here in the USA besides how expensive SMS was/still-is here. Similar needs, different deployment.
Now that as a mobile company, you have users whom generally do not have PCs, but do have keitais and whom are demanding wireless access to more than just SMS. Many of these users also do not drive/own cars but spend much of their travel time, probably bored to death, riding on the trains surrounded by ads. Talking on keitais is generally frowned upon as being impolite, disruptive, and there's lots of noise on trains. So what's the solution and what do you give them? NTT's iMode, wireless web access, and now wireless tv on phones.
These people have a bit more money because they're not spending on road maintenance taxes, gas pump prices, insurance costs, registration fees, high priced bling-bling SUVs. They're also healthier because they spend some time walking every day to/from the trains instead of waddling out of their blings and homes, so probably lower health costs except for all that smoking.
Now these folks are already buying stuff with their train access swipe cards, why not combine it inside the keitai? They're already surrounded by ads in the train, why not give them some ocr through the camera on their phones so they can easy scan in the company phone number and web site address and troll through "services" while riding on the train? Why not also put these as quick-scan QR codes in magazines so users can whilst their time away reading, browsing, shopping your products? Since the phones are now debit card enabled, one-click shopping while standing up in a train is brought to new heights.
The keitai is the single most important convergence device in Japan due to environment, evolution, and demand.
So, unless the USA has less alternatives for web/email/IM access at home, convert to light-rail train/bus for most of our daily travel (or at least work/school commutes), have ubiquitous wireless access even underground in subways, roads, and buildings (or have spent 10 years demanding it because we have nothing better to do), the USA will take a very long time to approach awesome phones as the poster asks about.
at&t did take one of the first steps by making wireless web browsing almost a natural right and lower-priced, although it should be same price ($19 or less) for all phones and pdas.
Meanwhile, waiting for my Kaiser because USA finally got a Japanese/European compatible air interface (UMTS/WCMDA) through NTT's kicking of AT&T's ass.
Off-topic, but I find it ironic that people on a Linux site are advocating "cathedral"-like standards to technology instead of the oft-lauded bazaar simply because of the simplicity standardization establishes.
:P
I sometimes imagine what if the Linux kernel and userland where built like that; might end up like BSD.
In the USA:
Sprint is CDMA
Helio is a MVNO off Sprint's network (CDMA)
Boost Mobile is the pay-as you-go for Sprint (CDMA)
Virgin Mobile is a pay-as-you-go, or monthly, and CDMA off Sprint's network
MetroPCS is a contract-less CDMA carrer in only certain metropolitan areas
Please name the rest of the dozen of GSM.