Slashdot Mirror
What's Keeping US Phones In the Stone Age?
knapper_tech writes "After seeing the iPhone introduction, I was totally confused by how much excitement it generated in the US. It offered no features I could see beyond my Casio W41CA's capabilities. I had a lot of apprehension towards the idea of a virtual keypad and the bare screen looked like a scratch magnet. Looks aren't enough. Finally, the price is ridiculous. The device is an order of magnitude more expensive than my now year-old Keitai even with a two-year contract. After returning to the US from Japan, I've come to realize the horrible truth behind iPhone's buzz. Over the year I was gone, US phones haven't really done anything. Providers push a minuscule lineup of uninspiring designs and then charge unbelievable prices for even basic things like text messages. I was greeted at every kiosk by more tired clamshells built to last until obsolescence, and money can't buy a replacement for my W41CA." Read on as this reader proposes and dismissed a number of possible explanations for the difference in cell-phone markets between the US and Japan. He concludes with, "It seems to me more like competition is non-existent and US providers are ramming yesteryear's designs down our throats while charging us an arm and a leg! Someone please give me some insight."
I finally broke down and got a $20 Virgin phone to at least get me connected until I get over my initial shock. In short, American phones suck, and iPhone is hopefully a wakeup call to US providers and customers. Why is the American phone situation so depressing?
Before I left for Japan about a year ago, I was using a Nokia 3160. It cost me $40 US and I had to sign a one year contract that Cingular later decided was a two-year contract. I was paying about $40 a month for service and had extra fees for SMS messages.
After I got to Kyoto, I quickly ended up at an AU shop and landed a Casio W41CA. It does email, music, pc web browsing, gps, fm radio, tv, phone-wallet, pictures (2megapixel), videos, calculator etc. I walked out of the store for less than ¥5000 (about $41) including activation fees, and I was only paying slightly over ¥4000 (about $33) per month. That included ¥3000 for a voice plan I rarely used and ¥1000 for effectively unlimited data (emails and internet).
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the costs facing American mobile providers can explain the huge technology and cost gap between the US and Japan. Why are we paying so much for such basic features?
At first, I thought maybe it was something to do with network infrastructure. The US is a huge land area and Japan is very tiny. However, Japan would have lots of towers because of the terrain. Imagine something like Colorado covered in metropolitan area. Also, even though places like rural New Mexico exist, nobody has an obligation to cover them, and from the look of coverage maps, no providers do. Operating a US network that reaches 40% of the nation's population requires nowhere near reaching 40% of the land area. The coverage explanation alone isn't enough.
Another possibility was the notion that because Americans keep their phones until they break, phone companies don't focus much on selling cutting edge phones and won't dare ship a spin-chassis to Oklahoma. However, with the contract life longer, the cost of the phone could be spread out over a longer period. If Americans like phones that are built to last and then let them last, the phones should be really cheap. From my perspective, they are ridiculously priced, so this argument also fails.
The next explanation I turned to is that people in the US tend to want winners. We like one ring to rule them all and one phone to establish all of what is good in phone fashion for the next three years. However, Motorola's sales are sagging as the population got tired of dime-a-dozen RAZR's and subsequent knockoffs. Apparently, we have more fashion sense or at least desire for individuality than to keep buying hundreds of millions of the same design. Arguing that the US market tends to gravitate to one phone and then champion it is not making Motorola money.
At last I started to wonder if it was because Americans buy less phones as a whole, making the cost of marketing as many different models as the Japanese prohibitive. However, with something like three times the population, the US should be more than enough market for all the glittery treasures of Akiba. What is the problem?
I'm out of leads at this point. It's not like the FCC is charging Cingular and Verizon billions of dollars per year and the costs are getting passed on to the consumer. Japanese don't have genetically superior cellphone taste. I remember that there was talk of how fierce mobile competition was and how it was hurting mobile providers' earnings. However, if Japanese companies can make money at those prices while selling those phones, what's the problem in the US? It seems to me more like competition is non-existent and US providers are ramming yesteryear's designs down our throats while charging us an arm and a leg! Someone please give me some insight.
I finally broke down and got a $20 Virgin phone to at least get me connected until I get over my initial shock. In short, American phones suck, and iPhone is hopefully a wakeup call to US providers and customers. Why is the American phone situation so depressing?
Before I left for Japan about a year ago, I was using a Nokia 3160. It cost me $40 US and I had to sign a one year contract that Cingular later decided was a two-year contract. I was paying about $40 a month for service and had extra fees for SMS messages.
After I got to Kyoto, I quickly ended up at an AU shop and landed a Casio W41CA. It does email, music, pc web browsing, gps, fm radio, tv, phone-wallet, pictures (2megapixel), videos, calculator etc. I walked out of the store for less than ¥5000 (about $41) including activation fees, and I was only paying slightly over ¥4000 (about $33) per month. That included ¥3000 for a voice plan I rarely used and ¥1000 for effectively unlimited data (emails and internet).
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the costs facing American mobile providers can explain the huge technology and cost gap between the US and Japan. Why are we paying so much for such basic features?
At first, I thought maybe it was something to do with network infrastructure. The US is a huge land area and Japan is very tiny. However, Japan would have lots of towers because of the terrain. Imagine something like Colorado covered in metropolitan area. Also, even though places like rural New Mexico exist, nobody has an obligation to cover them, and from the look of coverage maps, no providers do. Operating a US network that reaches 40% of the nation's population requires nowhere near reaching 40% of the land area. The coverage explanation alone isn't enough.
Another possibility was the notion that because Americans keep their phones until they break, phone companies don't focus much on selling cutting edge phones and won't dare ship a spin-chassis to Oklahoma. However, with the contract life longer, the cost of the phone could be spread out over a longer period. If Americans like phones that are built to last and then let them last, the phones should be really cheap. From my perspective, they are ridiculously priced, so this argument also fails.
The next explanation I turned to is that people in the US tend to want winners. We like one ring to rule them all and one phone to establish all of what is good in phone fashion for the next three years. However, Motorola's sales are sagging as the population got tired of dime-a-dozen RAZR's and subsequent knockoffs. Apparently, we have more fashion sense or at least desire for individuality than to keep buying hundreds of millions of the same design. Arguing that the US market tends to gravitate to one phone and then champion it is not making Motorola money.
At last I started to wonder if it was because Americans buy less phones as a whole, making the cost of marketing as many different models as the Japanese prohibitive. However, with something like three times the population, the US should be more than enough market for all the glittery treasures of Akiba. What is the problem?
I'm out of leads at this point. It's not like the FCC is charging Cingular and Verizon billions of dollars per year and the costs are getting passed on to the consumer. Japanese don't have genetically superior cellphone taste. I remember that there was talk of how fierce mobile competition was and how it was hurting mobile providers' earnings. However, if Japanese companies can make money at those prices while selling those phones, what's the problem in the US? It seems to me more like competition is non-existent and US providers are ramming yesteryear's designs down our throats while charging us an arm and a leg! Someone please give me some insight.
American's are more willing to pay for their techy gadgets. If the overpriced stuff here was perceived as that overpriced, no one would buy it, and the cell companies would be forced to sell their gadgets cheaper or with more features. I don't see this changing in the near future because we are accustomed to the pricing companies like Cingular and Sprint give us.
SmartBox
No two ways about it. Especially the old-school players like VZW, who have that MaBell attitude.
circa75.com
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.
He just used the iPhone as the starting point for his article, as that is the most "modern" american phone. Yet you seem to be extremely defensive about it. I say go away fanboy.
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.
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 |
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.
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.
Well, uh, great, but my phone thats more than two years old, already does all these things, and it is smaller than the iphone. It's just once you live in Japan you accept that keitais here are superior, far superior. The iphone actually more compares too Willcom devices, which are more PDA. I dont see the iphone as a phone, as it it is extremly large.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
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 ... ;-)
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 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.
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 think you're missing the point. This isn't a rip on the iPhone, but on the American cell phone industry as a whole. There are many things lacking here.
If you've ever been overseas to a developed Asian country, you'll understand. If you haven't, I don't blame you for your shortsightedness.
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?
He didn't say his phone was better than an iPhone, he said the features which are touted as new on the iPhone are not as novel or original when compared to the phones on the Japanese market.
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"
He doesn't dis the iPhone (other than implying it and all other U.S. phones cost too much).
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?
Why do we in the U.S. have to even deal with ATT to get an iPhone? Why can't I just put a Verizon SIM card in my Nokia 3200? Why is the U.S., arguably the technology forerunner for a lot of the 20th century, falling so far behind so quickly? I mean, "No Child Left Behind" shouldn't have done that much damage yet!!
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. Europe and Japan were quick to adopt (and improve) many of our technological advances in manufacturing, etc. over the past hundred years, I just hope they have the wisdom to avoid adopting our economic "advances" now.
"Proximity to wonder has blunted our perception and appreciation of it" --Tim Hartnell in 'Exploring ARTIFICIAL INTELLI
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
Thank you! I had no idea that my love of new and interesting technology and my desire to be able to use the internet outside of my house/work was a result of desire for a larger penis! You've changed my life with your keen insight and ability to correctly identify what every single consumer actually wants, whether they know it or not.
No, that link you posted to a web comic we've all seen a hundred times is not "obligatory."
Enough said.
Yeah, if you want more tech gadgets, buy separate gadgets and go early 90's Bat-belt style with them!
I used to agree with you. Back when putting everything in one device increased the cost exorbitantly, or resulted in sub-par performance. But those days are over. My life is easier and more fun when I carry a phone, camera, web-capable PDA, and handheld game console. As many of those functions as I can cram into one device, without sacrificing performance or increasing cost more than linearly, I will take. 2 megapixel is plenty for snapshots, and lots of companies are putting 2MP in camera phones now. Phone+PDA has been trivial for years, but now we are starting to get open platforms so I can run the software *I* want on the device. As to gaming, that's tougher, but with open platforms it will solve itself.
To quote Beavis and Butthead
(From Memory)
Beavis: Hey Butthead what do you think things were like before cable?
Butthead: Beavis you dumb a$$, they always had cable just not as many channels.
Beavis: Oh yeah.... Progress is cool.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
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]
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.
Why do they have a monopoly? Because of our legislatures.
There you go.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
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?
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
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Maybe, just maybe, most American cell phone owners do not want the newer phones that have 100 more do-dads built-in than last years model. How many features can you build into a tiny space before you go beyond what the consumer actually wants?
Bearded Dragon
Verizon uses a CDMA network which does not use a SIM card or at least it did not when I was a Verizon customer several years ago.
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.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Just because YOU don't need or use these functions doesn't mean others shouldn't either. What you are saying is that everyone, who wants a mobile phone, a radio/music player, an organizer, a digital camera or even a mobile office suite should get a device for each of these functions. Last time I looked, my jeans didn't have more than three pockets. People like you are the reason why the gadget market is the way it is, all over the world - except for Japan. So stop ranting about "people's obsession with fancy-ass gadgets" when you obviously are obsessed with "I don't like it, so nobody should have it".
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.
www.unofficiall.com
Exactly.. which is why I kept my desert storm gear.
:D HOO-RAH!
Let's see, I have pockets for my...
- phone (calling + directory)
- TI calculator (durr.. I can do math, me)
- PDA (calendar / planning, of course)
- iPod (music)
- FM radio (talk radio)
- blackberry (vroom-vroom e-mail for the hasty world)
- Treo (web)
- two-way (walkie-talkie for you 80's kids)
- flashlight (what? it gets dark!)
- camera (digitized *click-CLICK* included)
- GPS unit (on the road again... lalala)
Okay, so a single device could conceivably do all of the above and many a current 'smart phone' will cover practically all of the above.. but then what excuse would I have to wear my patriottism on my sleeve?
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.
Please stop and read your own posts before you write them. You're saying that american consumers "do not want more do-dads"? Are you certifiably insane? We'd attach a spork to a blender if we thought it would be beneficial.
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
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 irony is that your post got modded up. :)
Seriously, I'm half with you on this. My cell phone is a phone I selected because I could plug it in as a USB modem and connect it to my computer, and other than that, it makes calls. It was one of the cheapest phones they had, and it's excellent for my purposes.
Do I need a way to check my email everywhere? Yeah, and that's why I carry a laptop.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
"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.
Landlines are analogue but have the same 8kHz of bandwidth, until they hit a switch, are digitized and sent over copper/fibre/optical/whatever.
I don't know what "standard" you use, but a cell phone with a decent signal in a relatively quiet environment sounds just fine to me. That's because GSM [the codec] is meant to model the human vocal tract and predict sounds well, and that it does.
Now if your phone is actually busted, or you're in a noisy area, or have a poor signal, yeah almost all cell phones will fail. But you're really conspiring against the technology in that case.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
*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.
The funny thing is that the people that just want a phone complain that the "just a phone" phones are too hard to find. They are out there but not in the numbers that you suggest.
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--
The thing about your list is that half of what you have listed can be done by a Blackberry alone. So you're reach the point of redundancy. Not to fault you for it...
Looking over the original "article" it seems that there are tons of phones that meet what is being bitched about in the US. The thing is that people don't buy them. Most people are not interested in having a gadget of this nature. Maybe that makes us backwards according to some but the bottom line is that people simply don't want these things.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I may be wrong on the details of data rates, but in my experience, voice clarity on a landline is completely superior. Maybe its personal...I've always had a hard time picking up people's voices in a crowded room even when the person is right in front of me. Sometimes I can hardly have a conversation on a cell phone. It is really that bad for me. Like I said, it makes no difference what phone I use. A landline I can hear a pin drop just like the Spring commercials. The GSM voice codec would just remove that pin-drop in the compression.
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.
No, we would attach a spork to a blender if we thought it would make us look cool.
We don't care if it is actually useful.
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".
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.
I think you by accident have managed to mention the REAL problem here: The binding between phone and provider, a.k.a. "locking". No US phone company will sell you a phone that hasn't been locked to them, and usually also crippled. And almost no customers know that they can buy phones that haven't been locked in the first place. And the few that do know that tend to ignore it, because in the US, shopping for the /cheapest/ and not the best is the way of life.
/them/ and not me, and I have the choice between buying from them or not buying at all. Cause a free market doesn't imply that there will be competition, but almost always causes monopolies and oligopolies to form.
So customers buy whatever phones the phone company makes available. Which is whatever is cheapest for the phone company -- either by the phones being old models that the manufacturer will sell them for a pittance, or by them not having functionality that might cut into the phone company's own revenue stream (like uncrippled file transfer over BlueTooth, WiFi or USB).
Worth noting here is that a great many Americans are poor, and can't afford anything except the cheapest available. While there's plenty of rich people here, they're not nearly as plentyful as the less rich, who have to turn the penny over before spending it. The median income in the US is way lower than other Western countries. This too drives what's being made available.
Combined with an unwavering belief Americans have that we're the prime nation on earth with the most technologically advanced equipment god and money can buy, they really THINK that what they're getting is state of the art, when in reality it's so obsolete and limited that the average European or Japanese wouldn't take it for free.
The overall mentality of corporate control and buying based on price more than anything else is also reflected in other ways in the US. Look at TV and radio, for example. Where many if not most western countries now have all the programming in wide screen, and radio broadcasts are digital, in the US, you still can buy low-res 4:3 TVs and people still listen primarily to FM (and even AM!). They still sell cassette tapes here, for crying out loud! 10+ Mbps internet which is common in Europe? Can't even get it most places, and Americans consider a crippled 0-256 kbps shared DSL line "broadband".
Back to the reasons why the US is such a technological backwater: I think it's mostly due to the demographics, with the median income being so low (meaning that most people don't have a lot of money), but also the capitalist system's propensity for ending up with very few and very large companies with near-monopolies or oligopolies in their areas, making it possible for them to sell their customers whatever makes the most profit, and where the customer's only real choice is to take it or leave it.
Where I live, I have the choice between Verizon for mobile phone (T-Mobile works in good weather, but with spotty coverage), Comcast for cable TV and AT&T for phone. Thus they can offer whatever makes the most profit to
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).
Aside from the other reasons, there is a technical one.
There is no common voicemail infrastructure or API, so they had to work with them closely to get Visual Voice Mail working. If you don't have VVM, you can't fully support iPhone.
It's that Japan is so far ahead of us that it just seems that way.
Already there. I don't need my mobile doing everything under the sun. I don't want to be able to surf the web on my phone, don't need it to be my electronic organizer, or even take pictures/video. I need it to be a reliable communications device, which it most assuredly is not. When my reception is not failing the phone is exhibiting all sorts of quirks that make it the electronic equivalent of a schizophrenic.
And face it -- the average consumer only buys these things because marketers tell them they should. I suspect if you took a random sample of 1 million cell phone users in the US, you'd find a good chunk of them don't use most of the functions their phone offers, and a subset of them probably don't even know they have certain capabilities in their phone.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Correction: I wrote "most American consumers". There is a segment that demands the newest, greatest, most feature replete product that Japanese scientists can create. This segment, like the video gamers for PCs, are the ones that push development and create the cutting-edge. But, this segment is small, compared to the rest of the consumers, people you might call 'average'. These people are content to pay as little money as possible for the phone as long as they have roll-over minutes, or more more shared-minutes, or the ability to track who has been calling your daughter. If you look at the cheapest of the cheap, they still offer a ship load of features.
Bearded Dragon
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.
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.
"there's a schizm between what the OP apparently wants and the "but I just want a phone" crowd"
That's why he is so surprised by the iPhone's hype. Either people want features (in which case other phones should have made it here before iPhone), or they don't (in which case iPhone should not raise so much interest).
The answer may well be that the iPhone hasn't truly raised that much *real* interest other than what the hype-and-cool marketing campaign would make you believe.
Yeah, because this problem just began with this administration. Oh, move along troll.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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" The features of the iPhone are *not* really exciting. I've been doing just about everything the iPhone does on my US market cellphones for years now. What makes the iPhone exciting is the IMPLEMENTATION. Browsing on my MDA, my Treo, or any one of the numerous devices I had in the past was a miserable experience at best. Browsing on the iPhone, even on EDGE, is 400000x better. That's just one example.
I don't think any meritorious argument for the iPhone is based on the feature list.
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
I'll bite:
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.
Why the hell would you want an MTI on a phone? What happens 5 months from now when it starts to wear out? Or when your fingers are too hot/cold/wet/dry and you start to misdial? Sorry, but this is a major complaint I've had about the iPhone all along.
Your phone runs Opera Mini. iPhone runs full blown Safari. It has a shell.
This is just wrong. iPhone does not run "full blown" safari, it runs a stripped version of Safari. And furthermore, it doesn't have a "shell": it's missing the goddamn 'ls' utility for fucksake. and the finisher in my combo:
Third party apps will soon be hitting the web in droves.
Except the iPhone is a closed platform; given, it's for security reasons, but they don't even have a J2ME implementation that you get on, say, the motorola v551 that was released four years ago. So you miss out on Google Maps (won't run on mini-safari), Gmail (might run on safari), and x, y, z J2ME app, which google is actually tending to pursue pretty seriously.
And lets not talk about the UI. Apple did this one, show me anyone who can do them better.
Two words: maximizing windows
And iTunes support, you do not have that.
I carry my iPod in my pocket and my phone on my belt. It's not that hard.
It has built in WiFi.
And it can't call over Skype... can you say crippled platforms?
FLAME ON
+5, Truth
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.
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?
I have never heard a cellphone that sounded anywhere near as good as even a cheap landline phone.
--- What?
Absolute rubbish! What part of Europe are you talking about? Here in the UK I don't know anybody without a landline, and it's always one of the first things to get connected when you move into a new house.
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?
Capitalism. Verizon doesn't have a "SIM" card. There are 3 different competing technologies in the US. Europe (and presumably Japan) mandated GSM. It's easier to come out with cool stuff if you don't have to design around 3 different carriers. I love my SIM card and the fact that I can switch phones in a second with AT&T. It took my parents almost a day to switch phones on Verizon. Apparently this isn't an important enough feature for people to swing behind one standard as with VHS vs Beta. Once that format war was settled all the 'cool' stuff started coming out. It's going to be the same with Blu-Ray vs HD. Companies are being conservative, you'd be in trouble if you put all your best engineers behind Blu-Ray and HD won. So companies are playing it safe.
Not to mention. We don't even use the same GSM frequencies. I don't know if that's because what the FCC decided to open up, but you can't even bring over a phone from the Europe because it won't work on our frequencies.
Slashdot is almost always up in arms when the US government mandates what technology. What if tomorrow 3 new bills were introduced into House & Senate: Blu-Ray is the next generation DVD format, Digital 8 shall be the only digital tape format sold in the US and AAC was the only format that could be sold in the US?
Do you want capitalism or do you want to push technology forward?
Precisely. That's part of the problem. Why can't everyone use one standard so we can switch from Verizon to AT&T, for instance, just by moving the SIM card?
I have visited the states several times now. And seriously the gap isn't so big (for Europe at least). You can find most (if not all) European models in the states.
I'm sure if you look around you, you will find most of the IPhone features. The trick
- A genius launched this product. A true marketing masterpiece.
There are several factors to explain the current "relative" gap IMHO
- Mobile phone users aren't as "mobile" as their European counterparts. For example I can leave in 48 hours a network for another and I keep my mobile phone number. All I have to do is sign a new contract with my new telco. It does mean that competition is higher. Nobody can protect itself behind outrageous contracts.
- It is illegal in a lot of European countries to sell locked device. A lot of European consumers buy their mobile phone by their own.
All in all It means that there is a vibrant economy (independant phone sellers, etc.) keeping costs down and services high.
So i'd say, with the proper legal framework, it would take one year or two to reach Europe. The problem is not technologic, you've got everything you need. for Japan I don't know, never been there.
Olivier
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**
Seriously, take a trip to Japan sometime, and use a cellphone there (ketai means CELLPHONE). US phones can't even begin to compete with Japan's offerings. I'm in the country right now with a POS rental, but I'd seriously love to use it back in the states over my Nokia N95 (too bad it doesn't support GSM, or US 3G signals). I highly doubt you can hold your cellphone up to dedicated pad to pay for things in the US. Hell most phones in Japan now have awesome built in OCR capabilties (getting Kanji readings seriously is AWESOME for someone learning the language). Theres a whole laundry list the OP doesn't go into that I'd kill for in the US market. Would go on about it, but it's almost 1:30am, and I needs sleep (Hokaido to Saporo in a few hours, 15 hours FTL!!!).
The sad thing is that none of this has to do with competition. Japan actually has next to zero competition between companies (they are all owned by the same people for the most part). Now if you wanna see competition between cellular companies goto Hong Kong. $13 a month for what I pay in the US at $70 a month without the ability to call international most places you wanna call without extra crazy fees. No contracts required to boot (5 cellular companies).
Since when do you need windows sounds to work either? My computer runs fine muted..
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.
"No US phone company will sell you a phone that hasn't been locked to them, and usually also crippled"
That's grim. here in the UK I paid £80 for a Motorola phone. I connect to orange on that phone, using a tariff that I got orange to match, which is from virgin. My monthly bill is around $3, for 2 phones, because I only pay per second of call time. (no monthly fee). There are no 'top up cards' or other bullshit. I get mailed a bill and pay by direct debit.
I flatly refused to buy into any new 'contract'. I just bought a new handset when my old one died.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I happen to believe that you are at least partly right. I personally don't care if my phone can surf the web, or listen to music, as I don't use a phone for that anyways. Its much simpler, cheaper, and more functional to have that in two devices. My phone can text and make calls, while my Zune can play music, video, and radio. Sure, I would like my phone to have a better camera, but since its so locked down I would have to pay to get he pictures off anyways, even that wouldn't be useful to me. And the best part is that both these devices are so simple I can operate them with one hand, unlike a certain phone by a certain company that was released recently.
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.
The median income in the US is way lower than other Western countries.
No.
also the capitalist system's propensity for ending up with very few and very large companies with near-monopolies or oligopolies in their areas
That may be a necessary condition for poor options, but it's not sufficient. Intel and AMD are essentially a duopoly, but they compete fiercely and we benefit from better products and lower prices as a result. For some reason that doesn't happen with telecoms.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
quad band gsm works just fine in both europe and the us.
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.
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.
I want to chime in at my disbelief at the American cell phone model. I lived in Taiwan for 4 years, and during that time bought my first cell phone. It was basic, crude, and perfect for me. The phone company (Chunghwa/Zhonghua) there allows you to buy timecards for your phone that are good for a set amount of money. Because I used my phone for basic communication and messaging, I could stretch that 500NT (about $15 US) over two months or so before buying a new one, essentially spending under $10 a month on calls.
So when I moved back to the U.S. in October, I was appalled at the inability to buy cell phones individually and the length of the contracts you had to sell your soul to. Admittedly, you *could* buy an individual cell phone, but the prices were so blatantly ridiculous as to coerce you to purchase a contract along with it. We bought the cheapest Nokia bricks along with our contracts.
However, not all companies lock you into a phone. We went with T-Mobile, and my wife was able to install their SIM chip on her Nokia from Taiwan. Unless things have changed, I believe Cingular also uses this model.
Perhaps Taiwan will eventually figure out how to exert the stranglehold American companies have on contracts bound to phones, but for now, I much prefer their system where you pick a phone, THEN pick a carrier.
The moon may be smaller than the earth, but it's much farther away!
"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.
Because the north american gov'ts are too bedazzled by arguments of "free market forces" to realise that they need to legislate standardisation for the common good.
Standardisation isn't really meaningful to the consumer unless everyone is doing it (the gain to the consumer is mobility and interoperability, but this only happens if everyone is standardised). Hence, there is no competitive advantage to be gained by standardising (essentially a variation of the prisoner's dilemma). Hence, it will not happen unless forced on the industry, it's too happy providing shitty, dated, overpriced services to consumers and claiming "difficulties in interoperability" between wildly different formats and protocols as an excuse.
Though what I've noticed is that when a full featured phone is released here in Europe, the US model is always degraded in hardware & software, so it's not just the provider thing.
The Nokia E61 is a perfect example of (what I consider the best phone I've ever had), and the phone was released in the US as Nokia E62 without wifi and other limitations. That must have been really frustrating for someone that wanted it in the US. And I've seen this happen alot.
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).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.
If that were to happen you'd probably see that initial 2 year commitment jump to 4 years so folks couldn't jump from provider to provider so easily.
If I may offer a contrarian sounding opinion. Hidden behind the apparent locking of the iPhone to a particular provider lies a concept I don't hear mentioned often. Apple has actually unlocked the manufacturer from the provider. I know this sounds contrary to what we see, but think about it. Where can you get an iPhone? Two places, AT&T stores and APPLE stores. Apple has created a technological and marketing infrastructure that simply has AT&T plugged into it right now. But, the mainstream consumer is being prepped for going somewhere other than an AT&T store, a Sprint store, a T-Mobile store, or what have you, to get a phone. A slick phone. A phone pretty much unlike any phone any existing provider already sells. Apple, in a fashion that rings like the Carter Phone decision, has stealthily created just that environment--decoupling the manufacturer from the network.
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...
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.
"My Treo 650 can do everything the iPhone can"
Your Treo does wifi and has a touch screen? And how much does the "sold separately" expansion card for the MP3 player hold? Does it also run OS X? That screen sure is big. Watch movies on it do you?
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
Q.
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.
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.
"If more people were thinking like you, we would still be living in the stoneage and thinking that god created everything because you say that there is no reason for advancement..."
Incorrect. I am a big fan advancement. But I cannot stand by idly while some nit-wit berates a population for not all being alike in the writer's opinion on the features of our phones. Should everyone drive a BMW? They are nice cars. They contain a lot of features. But not everyone an afford them. Maybe a Hyundai Accent offers exactly what you need. Should the Hyundai buyer be shamed for not wanting car with wiper blades on the view mirrors? "It's a feature, you luddite, buy it! You know you want it!"
And so it is with phones. Personally, I just want a phone to be a phone. I want it to be very good at sending and receiving my phone calls. Some other features make for logical company, like, storing the numbers of your friends, showing the current time and date. Other features are just fluff that waste battery life and add needless complexity.
Let the consumers of the market determine what they want. Let the market be filled with products that fill every niche.
Bearded Dragon
That's lying with numbers. Note that what the Wikipedia article states is household income. Median income per adult is a paltry $23,500. And this is before paying for what other countries have already paid for, like healthcare and schooling. There's little left for paying for things like advanced technology for most Americans.
Also, the graph compares with the worst of other countries (like the UK, which is another black hole as far as technological advances go), not the best.
The picture becomes even more bleak if looking closer at the numbers. Here in the US, 40% of the population gets distributed less than 1% of the wealth (while the top 1% controls 38% of all wealth). Expensive cell phones is then just out of the question for a large part of the population, unlike in Japan and Northern Europe, where they're ubiquitous.
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
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
Speaking of making no sense, this one always makes me laugh. What's so amazing about the Google Maps app? Why do I have this suspicion that if you peeked "under the hood", you'd see it was a link to Safari, pointing to maps.google.com (maybe maps.google.com/iphone), with a command line parameter or two to hide some UI? But "OMG!! REVOLUTIONARY!"
You can install Live Search (with directions, with GPS integration, with realtime traffic) as a standalone app on Windows Mobile devices, so forgive me for being underwhelmed by the legions of "OMG, ITS A STANDALONE APP!"
"When do you need extra ringtones to make a cell phone work?"
You have obviously never been around an office filled with cellphones that all have the same ring. I was working in Indonesia for a while where cell phones are ubiquitous, as they are way cheaper than landlines and, well, mobile. It really is quite funny to see 10 people all reach for their pocket every 5 minutes when someones phone would ring. We would try changing ringtones, but all 4 of the built-in tones sounded pretty much the same and I'll let you do the math, but 4 ring tones and 30 people. The same thing would happen on buses or in other public places, where the same el-cheapo phones were extremely common.
U hereby acknowledge that this post contains some slight exaggerations for dramatic effect
the above is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect that of the little voices in my head
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
No, we'd put the spork IN the blender, and an old guy wearing a lab coat will show off how powerful his $400 blender is by blending the spork and putting up videos of it.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 SU CK IT MP AA
I wouldn't have one if it wasn't required for ADSL, and many people I know feel the same.
Get your own free personal location tracker
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?
The median income in the US is way lower than other Western countries.
um.... no. The median income in the US is actually higher than most other Western countries. And more of that income is actually kept by the wage earner, rather than being paid in taxes.
Back to the reasons why the US is such a technological backwater: I think it's mostly due to the demographics, with the median income being so low (meaning that most people don't have a lot of money)
Repeating a falsehood doesn't make it so. As for being a technological "backwater", what country do you think invented the LCD? Or the transistor? Or the microprocessor? Or for that matter, the cellphone?
Yes, that's right... good old backwater USA. Next!
The compete because it's easy to stop buying one and move to the other.
1. When you buy an Intel chip, you're not stuck buying only Intel chips for your next few computers.
2. They use essentially the same architecture, so you don't need to buy/build all new software when you switch.
Competition is meaningless if customers get locked in.
(IANAL)
"You have obviously never been around an office filled with cellphones that all have the same ring. "
True, but I have worked with people who had a functional sense of touch, and their phone set on vibrate.* "Hey Joe is that your phone vibrating or are you just happy to see me?"
*Especially since most businesses severly limit cell phones ringing while you work.
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.
I never really have a hard time making out the call. But as to "clarity of landlines" how often do you make landline calls from a shopping mall? Or outdoors in a parking lot? or .... etc. It's easier to have a clear call when you're inside a house, 50 ft from the road with the windows closed ...
I suspect maybe you have experience with a combination of problems including shotty cell phones and poor circumstances.
I *only* have a cell phone and for basically all of my calls I can talk and hear just fine. Sure it's not 100% as crisp as a landline, but wtf do I care, I can also bring the phone with me anywhere on earth [it's a quad-band GSM]. And given that I have used it in Europe already I'd say it's worth having.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
Flamebait?
Yes! Burn karma burn!
Bearded Dragon
Storm
There is wifi available for it
Are you being obtuse? Palms have had a touch screen since they came out over ten years ago.
I don't know what you are talking about, but TCPMP seems to play my OGGs just fine from any of my SD cards, which I've been using since I had a Palm m500. It's also handy to take the SD card from my digital camera and upload the pictures to my webserver via my Treo.
No; that's one of the reasons I like it :)
Yeah, it's about 75% the size of the iPhone's screen. Not too shabby, especially considering that it came out on the market years ago.
I do, with the aforementioned TCPMP, which I have source to. "HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is my current favorite. I also play NES and GameBoy games, keep track of my car's mileage, keep track of my finances, keep track of my passwords, administer my servers remotely, read books, get directions, browse the web, etc, etc. Hell, I can even write and run software, right on my Treo! I haven't been paying attention, is Apple allowing people to even *load* third party software on the iPhone yet? How about that battery, can you swap it out with a spare like I can on any of my Palm devices and cell phones? Can you expand the memory? $600 is a lot, but I can buy a Treo 650 and 15 1GB SD cards for that much money. Plus I wouldn't be locked into a single provider. Or I could even wait three months and get a fully open-sourced phone with even more features, and port all the software that I use to it.
You're "does it run OSX" bit gives you away: you're an Apple fanboy, and the only reason you replied was because you didn't have points to mod me down. Face it, the only thing new that the iPhone brings to the cell phone world is Apple's marketing power.
Nathan's blog
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.
I've 'said' it once.
/home to wherever your phone pops up when you plug it in, if it does at all. Files you found on Magnatunes despite the 1990s era interface it offers from Rhythmbox. Enjoy the feeling of freedom you get when you spend 100 man hours to accomplish what most of us invest a few seconds in.
You may not use iTunes but a great many of us normals do. I know the media isn't in an obscure enough format for you. I know it is offered by a large corporation that isn't Google. I know you lie awake at night worried about proprietary this and locked in that.
Most of us don't, we just want our gadgets to work and Apple has delivered exactly that when it comes to digital music. Time will tell if they have also done it with mobile communications, but iTunes integration isn't exactly going to hurt their chances.
So you go ahead and drag and drop your media files from
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.
But will it blend?
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...
You may not but I can tell you that here in the hills of WV there are black holes where no transmission gets in. Not radio, not TV, not satellite, and especially not cellular.
That issue aside, there is also the wrong you are doing by putting all your eggs in one basket so to speak. You have your internet, phone, video all running through one provider. That is a weakness. What will you do when that provider has router problems? Now your internet, phone, or TV aren't working. Recently the WV capitol decided to install VoIP phones in all State offices there. They then yanked out all the landlines. Guess what happened last week? You got it.... The network collapsed taking ALL the phones with it. Not a good thing to have the Governor out of communication for an extended period of time (not to mention the State Emergency Operations Center located in the capitol)...
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
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.
Your post would probably be a lot more coherent if you could manage to stop making out with your iPhone for a few minutes while you typed.
Before I get into an iPhone rant, let me just point out that the article isn't even about the iPhone. It's about the poor selection and ridiculous rates imposed on us by major wireless carriers in the US. (Somehow saying "everyone should just get an iPhone" rebuts that?) And it's absolutely true. Please explain to me why I should have to pay orders of magnitude more to send a 20-character text message than I do to make a minute-long call. Or why Verizon et. al. can get away with locking out most of the functionality in every handset they sell, only to resell those functions in diluted form for a monthly fee. It probably comes down to an apathetic consumer movement or some sort of collusion among the major providers or something like that. But anyway, about your hot, sweaty romance with the iPhone...
The only person I know of who thinks removing buttons from user interfaces is a good idea is Steve Jobs. Personally, I like tactile feedback. Maybe it doesn't appeal to your minimalist aesthetic tastes, but I can dial my Samsung A690 in the car without causing a major traffic accident.
I also care a great deal about vendor lock-in. I'm stuck with a large collection of iTMS songs that I flat-out can't use, because the Vista 64 implementation of iTunes is so poorly written that just playing a song drags the whole system to a crawl.
I also have yet to talk to anyone I respect who thinks people will be lining up in droves to develop web apps for iPhone. And wow, it runs OS X. What, exactly, does that get you? Especially in exchange for the multi-gig OS image that effectively renders the thing incapable of storing more than one movie at a time?
I'm glad you like your iPhone. But it doesn't mean the rest of us are stupid for not being impressed with an overpriced, underfeatured toy that can't do several things my four-year old Samsung can do. (Voice recognition? How can a phone without buttons not have voice recognition? That doesn't strike anyone else as incredibly stupid?) I'm much more impressed with people that evaluate products on their merits, and not on the brand stamped on the back.
Oh, and enjoy your $2,000 Cingular contract. If that exclusive deal wasn't a poison pill that drove hundreds of thousands of potential customers away, I don't know what is.
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
Dude, everyone knows the IPhone is a joke. I agree with the poster. I have spent the last year in Beijing and cant believe what you get for you Yuan over there. SMS is for the most part free! Yea, Free! And whats up with "Locked" Phone shit? Go buy a SIM card, buy some minutes and your good to go. America sucks for mobile technology. It sucks because there are only a few companies and no competition. Remember ATT breakup in the 80's? Wow! look at em now! Cell Phone, TV, Internet, Land Line. Give me a freakin break! US sucks when it comes to technology. And people can figure it out when they leave the Luby's and go overseas
Most of the phones sold in Europe are triple- or even quad-band phones, which work anywhere GSM is supported (even the US!)
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.
Or go to India - with the state owned BSNL you pay -
$0.025 per minute for anywhere in India
$0.0005 per minute between BSNL subscribers
$.125 per minute for calls to US from India
US cell phone industry is still in dark ages.
And will Apple want to put out an iSporkoBlender afterwards?
Well, since the Treo 650 is no longer available, I can only basically compare the 750 to the iPhone.
.mp4, and .mov files, or that I can't connect with Bluetooth 2.0. The iPhone also claims to have double the amount of talk-time battery life, though the stand-bye hours claims are similar. In any case, this is just a cursory comparison. I know that there are other things the this Treo can't offer, just as there are feature the iPhone doesn't have yet. But it's really not accurate to claim that the Treo has everything the iPhone does, because it clearly does not.
Memory storage:
750 = 128MB (64MB user accessible), up to 2GB available (sold separately)
iPhone = 4 or 8GB
Processor:
750 = 300MHz Samsung
iPhone = 667MHz ARM (possibly the Samsung S3C6400)
Display:
750 = 240 x 240 (16bit) basic touchscreen
iPhone = 480 x 320 (160dpi) multitouch
Weight:
750 = 154 grams
iPhone = 135 grams
OS:
750 = Windows Mobile
iPhone = OS X
So while it's obvious the Treo has more total features, it's not accurate to say it has "everything" the iPhone does. Though I suppose on a basic level it does. It has a screen. It has memory. It has a processor. I guess to some that's "everything". I was actually quite surprised, for example, that I would need to buy an extra adapter to use 3.5mm stereo headphones, I can't play m4v,
And no I was not be "obtuse", nor was I being bumptious.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
Wrong. In Europe, the GSM standard effectively means you could switch out SIM cards to just switch providers. Since telephone manufacturers and telcos have a mutual contract, usually you buy a phone that is subsidised by a fixed term contract, enforced by locking the SIM to the phone.
However, there is enough competition that contract terms rarely go above one year, and in cases they do, the standard term is 2 years. I have not seen a longer-term contract and attendant sim-lock in 10 years.
So no, that argument won't fly.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Now if you wanna see competition between cellular companies goto Hong Kong. $13 a month for what I pay in the US at $70 a month without the ability to call international most places you wanna call without extra crazy fees. No contracts required to boot (5 cellular companies).
Now if any of their cell phone companies would just try expanding over here. They'd own the US cell phone market in 90 days. In this day and age of multi/trans national companies, why aren't their international cell phone companies operating in Japan, Europe, and the US? If there are Hong Kong cell phone companies that can profit at $13 a month why don't the US large cities have the same prices? You'd think that our domestic market could sustain some competition.
Well one reason the carriers have much, much more area to cover. Japan is about 145,840 square miles, while Florida (where I live) is alone over 1/3 of that at 54,252 Square Miles. California alone is 3537441 square miles.
So the US carriers have to have much, much more infrastructure to cover. And infrastructure costs money, which comes from, you guessed it, the customer.
What use is OCR on your phone? Seems like a feature you use once to say "oh, that's neat" and then never use again because it's not actually useful, just neat.
I can hold my wallet in front of things to pay for them using the RFID card in my wallet. I also use it routinely to open doors and use elevators. Why is using my phone better?
With the opening up of the analog TV spectrum, it's likely the US market will get a drastic overhaul too. The FCC wants to do something similar to Hong Kong i hear.
Just get a Quad-Band GSM phone...works on any GSM network.
Unfortunately, as is usual when the rubber of ideology hits the road of reality, the countries that have a mandated government standard for mobile communications are the countries that are pushing technology forward. They are also countries where there is a vibrant free marketplace for technology, none of that neo-feudalism of the U.S. mobile market.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
"p$wned by the chinese?" thats just stupid. By international standards anywhere between 120-130 million of the chinese are below the poverty line. Obviously its only a matter of time before they do become the economic superpower, but its not there yet.
"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?"
Ahh spoken like a true hater of America. Say whatever you want, but i'd rather live here than wherever you are.
www.unofficiall.com
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.
This is a great post. However, it fails to emphasize the real reason: Consumer Rights.
In Europe, the companies are afraid of their consumers.
In U.S., the consumers are afraid of the companies. -- And somehow it always come true; the US is all about selfishness; A result of a society with only one rule: Profit.
The European companies learned a long time ago that they have to work together and make universal solutions for a long-term profit, whilst in the U.S. the companies seem to get into wars and limit their customers from other competitors. Why? Because, in the U.S., the government have less power than the companies.
I've watched some of Michael Moore's films, and even if he sometimes loose his objectiveness, he's still the person all you U.S. citizen should learn from.
What's Keeping US Phones in the Stone Age?
- Because the US need a wake-up call.
The iPhone has a glass screen, bud. I assume you're not walking around with a pocket full of diamonds...
http://www.farmerbob.org
Nonlinear voicemail. Got that?
Seriously after doing your inbounds like email - and pausing, cueing, and playing messages like an iTune (non linear: rewind, replay a snip from any part of the message etc) - you'll never want to go back. It feels like going from an ipod interface back to cranking up the 78rpm victrola in comparisson.
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
Maybe it doesn't appeal to your minimalist aesthetic tastes, but I can dial my Samsung A690 in the car without causing a major traffic accident.
How about not doing that at all. It's a car, not a phone booth.
...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.
Well, strictly speaking if you're into convergence (of which the iPhone is a clear example), and if enough people got on board, you could replace two devices (wallet, phone) with one phone. Or at least carry a much skinnier wallet.
The OCR/bar code stuff could be useful too, just look at delicious library on a Mac. Then again, technically nothing precludes using the iPhone's camera the way delicious currently uses my MacBook's iSight.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Ok, try sitting in a quiet room that has good cellular reception with your good quad-band cellular phone. Now call up some kind of number that plays music while you are on hold. Compare the difference between a landline and the GSM codec. Ok, so you may claim that the GSM codec is designed for speech instead of music. Of course it is. However personally I have a much easier time hearing voice with whatever the landline codec is (which I thought was 56 kb/s). Chopping the frequency response for "typical" speech doesn't cut it for me. Maybe you have super hearing comprehension. I don't. I'm not the only one who believes this. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal making a similar claim about the superior voice quality of landlines.
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.
No, we would attach a spork to a blender if we thought we could make an infomercial and sell a couple million of them...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Compared on a checklist the "features" look the same. It's how the features are implemented, however, that make the difference.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Why do people keep pretending that the ease of use of the iPhone isn't a feature!? Arguably it is the most important feature to arise in cellphones introduced to the US in a long time!
Nokia E70
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
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.
Interesting . . . I haven't done enough research on the subject to really have an argument, but it you are correct then I'd be all for being able to simply switch SIM cards to switch providers.
Don't even mention the national no-radio zone in Greenbank, WV further limiting the ability to get cell phone service even when you are on top of one of the biggest mountains in the area.... In general, in non-rural WV you gotta be around an interstate to get service and even then its sporadic.
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.
"Go away troll."
Give me a break dude. Your entire post was a troll. Even if the article has flamebait in it your post was 10x worse.
Do you honestly think that "us americans" no longer want to use buttons? PLEASE DUDE. Snap back into reality for a second.
"Call it vendor lock in if you want, we don't really care, we just want to enjoy our media."
HAHAHAHHA, said like a true apple fanboy. My god where did you come from dude?
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
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."
i think you're missing two details:
1. half the argument in the original ask-slashdot post is that we pay too much for even the crappy service we do get, which can't be explained away with "maybe we don't want to do it the Japanese way" because i'm sure you do want cheap service to go with your non-fancy phone
2. the other half of the argument is that if you wanted a really nice phone you can't get one, because the entire range of devices goes from "no-frills" to "out-dated everywhere else in the world". the fact that you personally (and people like you) may not want a fancy phone doesn't mean that your preference should be the upper edge of the market, because the fact is that there are some people that want a fancy phone and the market underserves them
Gotta love your optimism. "It's Apple, so how could it not be better?"
They have a free market on phones.
We have a free market on technologies.
Everyone of the shortcomings of GSM is realized all across Europe. Where as if I can't tolerate GSM's shortcomings (what ever they may be), I can switch to TDMA.
Which one is better?
you miss a large part of the point still and your analogy is broken. Right now there is no BMW of phones in USA. sure there's the iphone and some blackberries but they dont really do anything anyother phone doesn't already do. all the differentiation is in the service currently which is STUPID.
.10 every time they used a manual shifter in the automatic cars; or everytime they accessed the 6th gear... or turned on the radio... etc. NO
your hyundai accent can't be bought with leather interrior, a bose sounds system, xm radio which you need a seperate subscription for, etc. but there exists another car that does. You have a choice.
I can't go to verizon and buy a phone w/o a camera and lots of stupid features I don't use. Basically you can buy a BMW or you can buy nothing. It's quite sad, a razr without paying a fortune for data plans has the same net functionality as a phone from like 2002. between 2002 and 1998 what changed? they added color... whoop de freaking doo.
When I buy a product such as a phone I expect to be able to use all of its features, not have to pay extra to use features it already has. Do you think BMW owners would be 'OK' with having to a pay an extra service fee of
but with our phones thats what we have. And a large part of the contributions to this post have noted how outrageous the service charges currently are for US cell phones. The phones are often locked down (ex. verizon who locks out OBEX in bluetooth so that they can try to charge you for the basic ability to store files on your phone, and load your own ringtones.)
and dont get me started on VCAST... oh you want to watch some video? oh you have to sign up for vcast for ~10 a month, and then pay for the right to see a video, and then pay for the airtime used to watch it.
Oh you want text messaging? oh that's extra too.... and we charge you for recieving them too and we don't allow you to prevent yourself from receiving text messages either.
meanwhile elsewhere in the world the rates arent nearly as exhorbitant, and policies are better... like not being charged to recieve a text message..
For the life of me I think its absurd that you are charged for text messages. The bandwidth it takes to send the average message has got to be smaller than that taken by the average telephone call.
Unless you want to get on a small service such as cricket, or take your luck with who carries the Jitterbug, you cant buy the phone you described thats just a phone.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
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.
You can't do that in Japan, either. Japan is like the US in this respect, most phones are locked to a specific carrier. Europe is all-GSM and SIMs are portable across phones.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I have a two-year-old phone that I got for a lot less than the iPhone. It doesn't have Multi-Touch, but it's got a nice screen and PIM functionality, and interfaces with iTunes. It's the V3i, I bought it on eBay for about $150. And you know what? It sucks. iTunes on a phone is even worse than iTunes on an iPod.
The fact that you just referred to an audio file as an "iTune" made me throw up a little in my mouth.
It looks to me as if iPhone fanboys are going to be every bit as annoying and moronic as their Mac counterparts. They'll be calling for people's heads if they don't praise iPhone as the greatest piece of technology since the steel-toed boot that gave them permanent brain damage.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
That's lying with numbers. Note that what the Wikipedia article states is household income. Median income per adult is a paltry $23,500. And this is before paying for what other countries have already paid for, like healthcare and schooling
Speaking of lying with numbers... did you actually read that Wikipedia article? You know, instead of taking median household income, and dividing it by 2, and claiming that's the accurate number? Sigh...
Combined with a translation service it sounds like an awesome feature for those who travel overseas and don't always speak the language. Finding out the sign you thought read "free beer" actually says "beware: angry tiger" might be useful to some...
Maybe i'm over simplifying things here, but I don't think it took a whole lot on AT&Ts part to support it. It sounds like it just automatically converts the voicemail into an MMS, and sends it to your phone.
Call bullshit all you want, but Palm no longer sells it on their site.
5 0/
"The Treo 650 smartphone is no longer available at Palm.com."
http://www.palm.com/us/products/smartphones/treo6
And defend your beloved smartphone, with all your über controllability all you like, but it simply cannot "do everything the iPhone can" no matter how you slice (I've already pointed out a couple in the few minutes it took me to look them up). Can it do things the iPhone can't? Certainly. Nobody is arguing that.
There are no gaps in my knowledge that I give a flying fuck about frankly, but even I, the lowly non-user of leet gear, can spot a crock of shit when I see one. So you can take your arrogant, smart ass condescension to your local geek club.
While you're at it, take a few lessons in how not to make unsupported generalizations and get called on them.
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
I think if we weren't nickel-and-dimed for every service that goes beyond voice calling, we'd be a lot more open to all those extra features. I'd love to be able to browse the web on my phone if I didn't have to pay $20 extra for a data plan. I'd text message slightly more than never if I didn't get charged every time. As it is, I only use my phone as a phone because if I just hit a wrong button, I have to pay for it.
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
You must be young.
I know for a fact that the PTTs were horrendous at customer service (including getting phone lines installed).
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I think the big reason is that you don't have to pay to receive mobile calls in the UK. I would probably keep a landline around if I had to pay for calls to my mobile. Since mobile-to-mobile calls are cheaper than landline-to-mobile calls, once a few people you know have mobiles, it starts to be cheaper to use them for outgoing calls too, and since they don't have to pay to receive calls it's not impolite to call their mobile first, instead of after trying their landline.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The iPhone looks like it has a nice UI, but it doesn't measure up feature-wise. I'm usually willing to pay a premium for a decent UI (I own a couple of Macs, after all), but I am not willing to pay a premium and sacrifice features I actually use.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Greed. Corporate greed. Americans are far too complacent and subservient to their corporate masters to EVER object.
One interesting thing about that graph. How come California is separated from the rest of US for median income but still gets 1.00 for PPP? I realize that PPP is generally calculated by country, but it hardly makes sense to assume that the cost of goods is the same in California as the average of the rest of the country.
Don't take flack from the other posters. You merely refuted the GPs statement, and Wikipedia's pretty accurate here, given what I've read from other sources.
Nah, I have an extensive DVD collection for a reason.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
If the distribution of income were linear, removing the top 1% would result in a .5% drop in median income.
It's not, as you pointed out. In a distribution with a middle that's quite flat, removing the top 1% will have very little affect on the result. This is why we use medians and not means.
correct... the parent is completely confused. The reason the telecoms don't, or barely compete is precisely because of government regulation. They don't need to compete because their markets are protected. Large monopolies or ogiopolies that are formed through regulation like phone companies... bad. Formed by providing great products at competitive prices relative to the competition like Intel and AMD... good. It's not so hard to understand. Fact is large monopolies or ogiopolies only form due to high barriers to market entry, either because of regulation or because the product in inherently difficult and expensive to develop or produce.
Welcome to the future fucknut. It is better than calling it An Ogg, or whatever you people have.
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;
Probably for the same reason that Mac people pretend the fact that they're used to how Macs work somehow makes them objectively superior to everything else.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
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 know why I want OCR on the phone.
I want to snap a picture of a business card and have it OCR'd and added as a vcard in my phone's phonebook, and when it syncs with the computer, it will be in Address Book. I can discard the stacks of business cards and not carry a goofy card scanner to conventions.
I want to be able to photograph receipts and OCR them, have them compile into an expense report and email them, so that I don't have to fool with losing a receipt or leaving it off a report.
Sure, I have manual ways of addressing both problems currently, but devices are meant to make my life easier and geekier. A 2 megapixel camera is sufficient for OCR. These things should be possible.
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.
I used to use Romeo on my Mac to pop up a dialog box with the caller whenever my old Ericsson T610 rang. It would check the number in my address book, and give me the name of the caller. As long as I was looking at my screen, or had my headphone on, I'd head the phone. One thing that always irritated me was that the computer couldn't act as a Bluetooth headset, and let me answer the phone without having to move (my phone was usually in my coat pocket, hanging up away from my desk).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Mod parent up.
Feature-wise (that's what the article was talking about), the Nokia N95 is widely considered the current technology leader in the current market place.
The iPhone is more about UI innovation than features - not to play down it's impact because of that, but still.
I think the N95 would stack up much more favourably against the Casio. It may not have the features out of the box, but S60 (the N95's OS) is designed so that you can add software to do many of the things listed (adding s/w to the iPhone is [currently] a hack and one still under development).
Max.
Example, or not, they wrote an application to the API and worked with Google to perfect the application. The Apple-proclaimed reasoning was that doing so allows them to give the user greater control than is possible through the web interface alone.
My experience with the application on the phone bears that out. When you step through the travel instructions, the map zooms out and in as needed (it just seems to get the level of zoom correct at each step without my need to pinch-zoom to adjust it), and it gracefully slides the map around at the same time.
Switching to the list view and back to map didn't require any hit on the edge network, it cached the whole thing first. In a browser, it would hit up the network again.
So I find Apple's claims to be sound, that it needed to be a separate application to deliver the experience.
I expect that Google and Apple will work together when the API for maps changes to avoid breaking it.
"There is wifi available for it"
:)"
So, an extra purchase means they are equal? Interesting logic...
"Are you being obtuse? Palms have had a touch screen since they came out over ten years ago."
... that you must use with a stylus. Nice try... but no cigar.
"I don't know what you are talking about, but TCPMP seems to play my OGGs just fine from any of my SD cards, which I've been using since I had a Palm m500. It's also handy to take the SD card from my digital camera and upload the pictures to my webserver via my Treo."
Cool, now you and the other guy that needs to do that can high five each other.
"Yeah, it's about 75% the size of the iPhone's screen. Not too shabby, especially considering that it came out on the market years ago."
The screen is far to small to watch movies on. Again, nice try. It's not nearly as bright either.
Does it run on OS X? "No; that's one of the reasons I like it
Well, that's just dumb. I seriously am not sure what that means.
etc... etc... etc... I can sit here and explain rare minutiae of anything that a small minority of actual users would need, and say that it sucks because it doesn't have it. In the same breath I can explain all the things that the iPhone does far better (and nicer, cleaner, more intuitive, etc...) for the other 95% of us. You claim he's an Apple fanboy, I claim you are clinging to your Treo as if it's the only thing you have ever loved in your life, and others are trying to say something is better, and you don't like it. No sir, you do not like it one bit!
Sorry, but that's what you sound like to me. I'll take the fanboy blurb any day over that.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
LCD: Discovered by Otto Lehrmann, Germany. First practical application: Marconi, Chelmsford, UK
Transistor: Julius Lilienfeld, Germany. Bell labs built working versions based on Lilienfeld's patent, but never referenced it as previous work.
Cell phone: German Vehrmacht vehicles during WWII.
You have a funny way of spelling "Germany". Next!
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.
Yes, I did. And I do not appreciate your blatant lying about me taking the number and dividing it by two to come up with $23,500. I read the article, and then followed the references from it, where I found the figure for individuals and not just households.
The W41CA can offer GB-sized expansion too- it's called MicroSD/TransFlash.
OSx86 FTW
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.
You don't seem to understand how corporations work very well.
In most corporations, stock price is all-important, so yes, pleasing the stockholders is of prime importance. This isn't because the board and CEO actually care about most of the stockholders, it's because they're also stockholders, and own very large amounts of stock (and options). They don't make most of their money from their salaries; they get it by selling their stock and stock options, frequently just after certain events which push the price up.
You're right that the board has the power, and that smaller stockholders' votes really don't count for much. However, the stock is really a vehicle for the executives and the board to drain money out of the company by playing games with the stock price, so all the company's actions can be traced directly to the intent of affecting the stock price.
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.
I'm not sure what it is you're trying to say. Cell phones are less expensive outside the US. Cell phone PLANS are less expensive outside the US. So, you're asking if I want to pay $149 for a high end phone on sign up and $70 a month for full service for 2 years HERE, or pay $40 a month with nothing up front for two years for the same thing, but a more feature rich phone which is easily number portable and always unlocked...
Gee, AC. I dunno. Math is really hard. I'm going to need you to guide me here. Strangely...these cell phone companies still make money. Probably by trading in on the 3rd world living standards of Europe and Japan!
Also, European phones are quad band mostly, and both EU and Japan offer FAR faster and more flexible broadband and text messaging features on their networks than we do, whatever initials we chose to use.
--- I'm going sane in a crazy world.
My cell also works as a telephone!
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Get it straight. The technology is already there. GSM and CDMA networks are up and running in the states. It's not about having the latest phones. It's about what we pay for what we get here.
Would you rather:
A) Pay less for a stripped down plan and get a lexan coated clamshell
B) Pay a lot for a stripped down plan and get a lexan coated clamshell
AU sells "kantan" keitais. They are simple phones for -special- people. Grey headed? They have a phone for you. And the best part is that they are cheaper. No, you don't have to buy a BMW, but I'll guarantee you that even the Hyundais of pack are relatively expensive here.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
Convergence is nice, but it can be a major pain in the ass too. If I slept in my car, I'd be more than pissed if it got stolen -- I'd be sleeping in the street! Likewise, if you lose your phone-wallet, how the hell are you going to buy a new one? You can't even go to the bank, because your ID was in the phone-wallet, and you can't call anyone because you don't have a phone. Obviously you'd figure something out, but I'm just saying convergence isn't without its drawbacks.
As for cash-boy, the above scenario is exactly why cash transactions will never cease to exist, so don't get your panties in a bunch. The rest of us will use our phone-wallet-cars and laugh at you as we drive our phones away while you're still counting your change, and you'll be laughing haughtily when our nanny-concubine-minifridges decide our children should be placed in cold storage.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
yeah, forgot two things I use a lot daily
- mobile cash at convenience store / JR tick (if I forget my suica card or its empty)
- QR code reading for all those nifty small ads where you can get things
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Just saying...
:)
What's the closest thing to a tricorder that you can buy?
I don't get the point of a 5 MP camera with a tiny lens in front of it. More pixels means fewer photons per pixel, which means poorer low-light performance and more noise. More than about 1/2 way out from the centre of the image, the airy disk (roughy speaking, the size of the smallest possible dot the lens can manage when focussing a point source) produced by the 2 MP camera on my phone is about five pixels. In other words, it takes pictures at 1600x1200, but with less detail (thanks to the additional noise) than it would have with the same lens and an identically sized 0.3 MP, 640x480 sensor. Hopefully one day the public will learn that beyond a certain point, more megapixels means worse images and I'll be able to buy a phone with a well-matched combination of optics and sensor.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
This is exactly why Australia is light years ahead in the mobile phone market. One telco owns most of the wired infrastructure and a majority of the wireless infrastructure. The telco in question is Telstra, which used to be Telecom Australia before it was privatised. To keep a fair and open marketplace the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) sets the wholesale price at which Telstra can sell the usage of its infrastructure to other telco's ensuring that the same quality of service can be delivered at competitive prices.
Telstra constantly whines to the ACCC to allow them to raise prices but the ACCC will not relent as this will allow Telstra to undercut competition (the ACCC is call the consumer/competition watchdog for a reason) and run the market as they see fit (Telstra only recently conceded that people want broadband faster than 1.5/0.5 Mbs ADSL).
I think the US problem is that many Americans believe in the infallibility of the free market and fail to grasp that in a monopoly situation the free market as such does not exist. The US would also have a problem running an organisation like the ACCC as in Australia these type organisations don't become politicised (they dont carry out the Liberal/Labour agenda) and act according to their charter despite being government funded, organisations that are government funded in the US seem to have a problem doing this.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You'd have to be happy to be in the top 10 countries in the world, and the USA is.
I guess what you don't see in that table is that most of the top 10 countries have universal health care. That's payed for out of taxes so the US income numbers should be adjusted for that.
I don't see what it has to do with being advanced either. Sure income distribution might be fairer in Australia than in Germany, France and Italy, but I doubt you'd say the country is more "advanced".
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
It's entirely valid to assume that landlines sound better. What I'm debating is whether it matters or not. The GSM codec is meant for voice, so it doesn't compress musical type sounds well. It isn't a function of "bitrate" or "bandwidth", so much as the codec being used. If you doubled the bandwidth for your GSM style CELP encoder [codebook excited linear predictive] chances are it still wouldn't compress music much better.
... :-)
Voice lines, as I recall use some form of PCM style encoding [uLaw or ADPCM or something like that]. It's still limited to the 8kHz band which is why most music sounds like shiat over it [anything that has high pitches]. But anything in the band should sound better. That's because landlines traditionally were allocated a slot of a T1 connection [iirc 64kbit/sec] which allowed the use of sample for sample encoders.
Granted nowadays, they could have used AAC to get voice in a 16kbit/sec channel and sound ok
Anyways, back to the point at hand. Sure cellphones are not perfect, but to blankly state they all sound bad is just stupid. Millions of people use cell phones each day, and most of them have perfectly fine conversations without having to repeat or misunderstand information.
If "all" of your calls are horrible, chances are you're either in a spot with no cell coverage, in a noisy environment, have a broken cell phone, or are just lying.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
You need to get a better cell phone.
I'll bet you find VoIP just fine though.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
Canadians.
"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them." ~ Louis Armstrong
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
That's lying with numbers. Note that what the Wikipedia article states is household income. Median income per adult is a paltry $23,500.
Source? Comparison to other countries?
And this is before paying for what other countries have already paid for, like healthcare and schooling.
Most Americans don't pay directly for healthcare either. (It's provided through employers which is truly idiotic, but that's a separate rant). Are the higher taxes for the "free" services accounted for?
There's little left for paying for things like advanced technology for most Americans.
That's just silly. iPods, broadband, and Xboxes are not remotely confined to upper classes.
Here in the US, 40% of the population gets distributed less than 1% of the wealth (while the top 1% controls 38% of all wealth).
Irrelevant; if the rich get richer, that doesn't change the median.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
How about not doing that at all. It's a car, not a phone booth.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but bad drivers are bad drivers. Regardless of the crutch of the day (cell phones, food, drinks, smoking, loud stereos, laptops, PDAs, friends, babies, make-up, HWD, stress, lack of sleep, whatever) these people are going to find a way to cause a collision one day no matter what we say, do or legislate about the matter.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
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.
This OECD chart is probably a better way of comparing income. It is GDP per head in order of ranking, and is not selected nations. You will note in the footnote that the PPP algorithm changes things a bit--such as Japan dropping because of it's high costs. (I don't know what goes into the PPP algorithm. For instance, health care takes up about 15% of US GDP but in Western Europe it's usually 8-10%. Does the PPP algorithm take into account higher health care costs in the US? I don't know for sure but I suspect it does. So the higher cost of health care in the US should already be built into the calculation that created that chart.)
Having said that, the chart does not take into account things like GNI. Ireland is doing extremely well, but since it's a highly export based economy now, and a lot of what it makes goes overseas, this chart implies it's doing slightly better than it really is.
And this is before paying for what other countries have already paid for, like healthcare and schooling.
If you are comparing statistics like median income from nation to nation, taxes aren't taken into account from that anyway, which is what pays for healthcare and schooling. So in that regard, the numbers are comparable without difficulty. If a PPP algorithm has been run on the data set than healthcare/schooling has been taken into account in some way in all countries.
Here in the US, 40% of the population gets distributed less than 1% of the wealth (while the top 1% controls 38% of all wealth)
I know and can confirm the latter statistic. I can't find the former but have no reason to believe it to be untrue, but there is a caveat to how those statistics can be read. Household wealth is assets-liabilities, and quite a lot of Americans have too much debt to have any wealth at all, regardless of their income. My parents, for instance, have a household income of $140k/year but between their mortgage, credit card, motor vehicle and other debts, they would be considered as having no wealth for statistical purposes and fall into that 40%, despite their fairly good household income.
I would have said mp3, but apple's default (and what I encode at because 160kbs AAC sounds a hell of a lot better than an mp3 at 160kbs) is AAC so I said iTunes. You can now spew to your hearts content.
Suuure you can switch, in theory. In actual practice, as you can see from the complaints of U.S. customers, switching is a hassle, unless you are willing to wait until your current onerous contract lapses.
And what's the use in switching to TDMA when all your friends are on GSM? At best your telco gets to hit you with a roaming charge.
And finally, it is time you woke up and actually looked at the European market, as it is currently transitioning to UMTS. Without giving up on compatibility with the existing GSM network.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
1. They'd need to do a total network overhaul
2. I use this piece of software to take care of the phonebook thing.
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
The distinction between "UI" and "features" only matters for marketing and bragging rights, not for real users. The iPhone deserves credit for lots of firsts that other companies laid claim to years ago on the basis of features that were so poorly implemented that most users ignored them.
Computing power in cell phones is ample these days. It is no longer impressive to pile on application after application. The UI is the limiting feature, and the iPhone simply embarrasses every other phone on the market in that category. I'm too much of a cheapskate to ever buy an iPhone, but I'm looking forward to the effect it will have on cell phone UI design. Maybe in five years I can buy a decent imitation of an iPhone without paying fashion trendoid prices.
I used the browser on the (prototype) n95 I had often and quite successfully; and I use it regularly on my 3250 (the same browser is available on all S60 3rd edition phones).
I've not used the browser on the iPhone, but I don't see how it would be any better, apart from the fact that it has a bigger screen...
While I agree with your general point,IMO, web browsing is not something that proves it. Perhaps it is true for typical US phones, but the n95's web browser is quite usable. You can even display on a TV if you happen to be near one, so screen size might not be so important in some (rare) situations.
I think the video someone did of people in line for the iPhone was quite revealing. They didn't seem to know that all these features could be had on other phones already, and then some. If they don't know they're available, then I don't see how they can compare. Most people only know the shitty little phones, not the ones in the same market as the iPhone.
Perhaps you could give examples of what phones they were comparing it with?
Max.
1. They don't use SIM cards because those are an artifact of GSM. Most of the US cell phone market, including Verizon Wireless, is non-GSM.
2. You can back up your address book online, over the air, for free, and restore it on your new phone for free. You will get bent over if you want an in-store tech to do it, though.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
You can also see that with the n800 and n95, the reviewer has to use two hands to use certain browser features. That can be awkward if you don't have anything to put the device down on. The iPhone can be operated just fine with one hand.
Heh, the reviewer just tried using touch again on the n800 and immediately switched back to the stylus. I cringe every time he reaches for the stylus. I don't understand why stylus interfaces suck. It defies common sense. They should be really nifty, but it just doesn't work out that way.
Anyway, back on topic, judging from the video, the n95 seems a lot like the very best cell phones I've seen, maybe a bit better. Almost everything works, but it takes a little extra care and effort to do fundamental things, you run into limitations, and you have to learn a handful of tricks to keep things working right. (The reviewer says he had successfully loaded the normal, non-mobile version of gmail on the n95, but he couldn't demonstrate it for the review because he couldn't remember how.)
For me, that just doesn't cut it. Every time you consider pulling out your phone and checking out something on the web, there's a little voice in the back of your head that asks, "Is it worth the effort? Is it going to piss you off and ruin your day if you spend half an hour trying to work around some limitation of the phone and never get to see what you wanted?"
With the iPhone, you don't worry about running into any limitations or needing to clutter up your mind with tricks and techniques for using the browser. You just pull it out and use it. That, for me, is the threshold of acceptability for a web browser.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
"Likewise, if you lose your phone-wallet, how the hell are you going to buy a new one? "
If you get mugged TODAY and they steal your wallet and phone... how the hell are you going to buy a new one? How will you call the police? Oh. Wait. I guess you ask someone to call the police and then you find a phone and call your credit card company and the phone company and... painful as it may be, put your life back together.
Next stupid question.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
> The iPhone can be operated just fine with one hand.
...and I can't think of any time I ever needed to use two hands with the n95
;).
Eh? How do you use the iPhone with only one hand?
That video you linked to isn't working beyond the first few seconds - for me - so I can't see it. Perhaps it'll load eventually. I *really* hate flash - it's *so* much slower than just a video (or html). I suppose that's an advantage the iPhone has over the n95
I can't really comment on much on what you say until I see the video.
Later, maybe.
Max.
"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.
Excellent point. Now, could we please never hear the phrase "made me throw up a little in my mouth" again? I think it was seeing it in an interview with that dweeb that played Wesley Crusher on Start Trek The Next Generation that absolutely tore it for me.
Yes, I know that this will probably generate "you're not the boss of me" posts. But Some Things Must be Said.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
See the iSporkoBlender nano next week.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
I tried gmail on my 3250 (an old phone, note) and it has a link at the bottom for the html page. I don't think that's the same as the ajax page though. Even so, I think the problem there is with google, not with the browser - I would guess they're specifically targeting their mobile page at S60 browser.
The video's got a bit further, but not far enough to see where he needs to use both hands.
Thinking about it, the only need to two hands on the n95 is when you copy/paste text. You have to hold the pencil/edit key down, move the cursor over the text to select to highlight it, then press the left soft key (labelled 'Copy'). To paste, you hold the pencil/edit key down, and press the right soft key (labelled 'paste'). Perhaps he was doing that...how do you do copy/paste on the iPhone, I wonder.
Max.
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.
Scan business cards into your phone? Check. Japan's already got it:
Sharp Advanced ed W-Zero3.
You don't use the camera... you literally slide the biz card in and it scans it.
Windows Mobile 6 phone with Office Mobile for Word/Excel/Powerpoint/PDF
Yours for about a little over ¥20000 with a one year contract.
Why do you hate freedom?
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
Though what I've noticed is that when a full featured phone is released here in Europe, the US model is always degraded in hardware & software, so it's not just the provider thing.
I've always understood that to be exactly the provider 'thing'. Most of the Nokia models that differ from the 'original' releases are tailored to meet the providers wishes, thus they have a different model number. For example, the original model is Nokia 6210 and if you come across with Nokia 6212, you can be sure that the model is tailored to specific providers needs by disabling some of the hardware/software features.
At least this is how it was done around 2000 when I spent some time in the UK. I noticed that if, let's say, Orange was carrying a certain Nokia model, the last digit was always different (as was the firmware).
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
The point is that 5 is more than 2.
Everyone knows this.
Phone salesmen don't even need training to sell it. They just say "Now over here, this phone has a 5 megapixel camera, where the other just has a 2.". Everyone knows 5 > 2.
As for the actual photos that come out of it, people are still mesmerized by the fact that their phone has a 5 megapixel camera in it.
I await the day when phones have good, bright, 100% coverage optical viewfinders combined with a Leica M mount. Cell phone cameras will be useless to me until I can put a Noctilux on one.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Brilliant!
Just as a technical aside - I have a Sony Ericsson K800i (came free as part of an 18 month contract with "Three" in the UK) and this supports: UMTS / GSM 900 / GSM 1800 / GSM 1900. The US uses GSM 1900 for it's implementation and my phone works out there.
l
Also, for all the posters getting excited about the iPhone's EDGE capabilities: EDGE is pathetic, it is capable of 90Kbps max. In the UK (and I believe most of Europe) everything has moved over to 3G ala UMTS which gives a reliable 300-400Kbps.
My plan gives me unlimited internet surfing, 5MB download to phone quota, 300 free minutes any network any time and 100 free SMS messages for USD $60/month (don't forget the high exchange rate atm) and as I signed up for 18 months I got the phone for free.
CNET quick guide to mobile/cell phone speeds: http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3504_7-5664933-5.htm
Couple of modifications (should have previewed):
1). I actually get 150 free SMS/month not 100.
2). Forgot to mention that for the first 6 months of the contract everything was doubled i.e. 600 minutes, 300 texts and 10MB download quota.
"...before paying for what other countries have already paid for..." I believe income figures are reported pre-tax, so those other countries haven't paid for it yet either. At no point in the article or sources does it specify take-home pay or anything else along those lines.
As for the relative wealth issue, allow me to pull numbers out of my hat to show why looking at percentages of wealth isn't very meaningful. Assuming 2 countries with equal populations, let country A have the bottom 40% of the population owning 1% of the wealth, and country B have the bottom 40% owning 2% of it's wealth. If the amount of wealth in country A is 2.5 times the wealth in country B, then the people in country A, despite wealth being less evenly distributed, are materially better off than the people in country B. Even this can be misleading, but for full detail you have to rank every individual on income and show the income curve, which is not feasible.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
Uh, no, VoIP sounds horrible too. You need to get a different landline phone, perhaps.
--- What?
My phone vibrates.
Thats what QR code is for. Allot of people in Japan include QR codes on their cards. You can stuff a properly formatted card file on those very eaisily. Why OCR when the QR grabs it all, and applies the data to the right items in the contact list?
Hong Kong has the lowest bar to entry for any buisness. Lowest tax rates, pretty good consumer protection laws, etc. The average taxation rate is low. Like around 10% or less. Companies pay squat when it comes to taxes so extra BS fees don't go over well. Plus the place is extremely densly populated so coverage is easier. Did I mention 5 companies with startups coming along quite frequently? HK IMO has the best economy in the world, and they don't even manufacture anything.
Dude, the FCC will never come close to doing anything nearly as cool with ceulluar systems when compared to Hong Kong. Red tape, the established players, and poloticians who want a cut will all get in the way. Hong Kong didn't have people standing in the way of startups, and still doesn't. Just annoying mainland China taxmen looking for handouts periodically.
"No US phone company will sell you a phone that hasn't been locked to them, and usually also crippled."
Untrue. Unicel (my carrier) does this. You don't even need a contract (although they'll knock some bucks off the phone if you do). They sell them set up and ready to go with their network, with a few value-adds, but the phones are unlocked and can easily be returned to a virgin-state for use with other GSM carriers.
Although smaller than Verizon, they aren't "small". They have a native presence all over the country, and through no-fee-to-the-customer roaming agreements with other GSM providers, can provide extensive nationwide coverage.
I use an unlocked Motorola V635 with them that I got elsewhere. I've sold unlocked phones from them on eBay to other people.
PDA-style phone with 640x480 resolution. Voicemail is recorded on the phone like an answering machine, you can listen to the people calling as they leave their message if you like to. Messages are stored on your phone, listed with callers phone number and length of the message. Scroll to the message you want to play, and tap the screen to play it. Sounds familiar?
I assumed everyone had nonlinear voicemail and was quite surprised when I read that the iPohone supposedly was the first to have it.
I lost my sig.
*Hadn't* expect that one. Somebody please mod parent funny.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
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).
Hong Kong has the lowest bar to entry for any buisness. Lowest tax rates, pretty good consumer protection laws, etc. The average taxation rate is low. Like around 10% or less. Companies pay squat when it comes to taxes so extra BS fees don't go over well. Plus the place is extremely densly populated so coverage is easier. Did I mention 5 companies with startups coming along quite frequently? HK IMO has the best economy in the world, and they don't even manufacture anything.
You'd think one of our major cities would be able to copy that. What am I talking about we'd need a real new third party that actually wanted to slash government taxes and regulations.
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.
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.
He did play a punk rocker in some B-grade sci-fi and got eaten by a giant house-filling snake with big teeth ("How big can it be? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!") That was ninety minutes of my life I'll never get back, but arguably Wil Wheaton's finest hour.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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
"You are only young once, but you can be immature forever." -www.animemusicvideos.org
http://www.metropcs.com/
http://www.mycricket.com/
http://www.xphilez.com/
http://www.moddz.com/
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
You definitely are. I don't work for AT&T, but I do work for a very large data carrier, and the "simple" steps as you describe are "extremely non-trivial" when done on a large scale across multiple decades of incompatible frameworks, especially when the folks who actually knew how the real systems really worked have been laid off to save costs.
The fact that you got worked up enough to write a long rebuttal to a completely offhand claim that the iPhone's surface is not sufficiently scratch-resistant says pretty much everything I possibly could. Especially if you're not on Apple's payroll.
The state of the US mobile phone market is borderline exploitative. I didn't even realize anyone had a dissenting opinion on that. We pay more--and get less for it--than any other developed country in the world. The reality, unfortunately, seems to be that the free market isn't so good at solving problems in sectors with a billion-dollar cost of entry. But anyway...
As for the buttons, you don't have conversations with your geek friends wherein you evaluate new products on their technical merits? And if you don't, then what makes you think you know more about it than the rest of us?
The cost of my phone's zero-movie storage capacity cost me a whopping sum of zero dollars. It's hard to put an exact price on the iPhone's movie playback capabilities, but suffice it to say it's probably significantly more than that.
Finally, I'd like to point out two things: First, that anyone who dissects a Slashdot post into ten blockquotes and responds to each fragment individually has no right to claim lack of time as a restriction for anything. Second, that dropping phrases like "rectangle blitting components" into your posts isn't fooling anybody who actually knows what those words mean into thinking you know what you're talking about.
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.
Have you ever even looked at an iPhone?
No, because, news flash, $500 for a PHONE? Right.
Why should a window be the arbitrary size of the screen, which has nothing to do with the content in the window?
Because I want to see the window and only the window- no other distractions, plenty of room for the application to show me what it wants to show me. This is especially useful for things which can be expanded to infinitely large size, like certain text and picture-based applications.
+5, Truth
> I can't really comment on much on what you say until I see the video.
:)
Finally, the video loads
He does show the N95 in landscape, but seems to use it in portrait most of the time. When I was using one, I used it in landscape mode all the time, and with one hand too. Also, when he does put it in landscape mode (apart from the very last 'scene', he pushes the slide all the way to the music player mode - should have pushed it only half way so that there is no keypad on either end - the N95's much smaller size is most apparent then too - as seen in the last scene.
There seem to be a fair number of times when each phone doesn't work, for whatever reason ('buggy', memory full, etc).
He says the N95 loads a 'mobile' version, but it only loads what it's told to, so that's the fault of google, not the N95. Perhaps it's because the N95's browser is WAP capable too, so google gives it a 'mobile' page.
He seems to 'oops' on the iphone at least as much as on the n800 (which isn't really a phone, but still). The number of times he 'double pokes' the iphone is very noticable. It's also very noticable how fluid the UI is (I wonder if that takes some getting used to).
I notice he has to pick up the iphone to make it switch orientation.
I don't really see him use the N95 with both hands, except when used in landscape mode, and it really isn't necessary to do that. Of course, you *can* use both hands with all the phones there. I do see him use the iphone with a single hand, but just for scrolling - every other time, I think, he uses two hands (unless it's on a surface). I guess it's possible to use a single hand, but not nearly as easily as with the n95, since it's designed for use with one hand (apart from the copy/paste function, which requires two fingers - so I suppose it's possible to use one hand, but very difficult).
I just heard him say, "One nice thing about the iPhone is that, as I type, it gives me quick access to the history [switches to the N800], as does this browser." - and, strangely enough, so does the N95. Why is that worth mentioning then, I wonder.
He doesn't seem to be aware that the N95 also can handle multiple pages. I wonder if he had multiple pages open already which is a good reason why it would run out of memory...
I also hear him say that the n800 and iphone give a better browser experience than the n95, which is undeniable, but it would be fairer to mention that it's also a much smaller device/screen and that is most of the problem, I think. He also says that the n800 has flash, but doesn't mention that the n95 also has flash (like all other S60/3rd edition phones, iinm). (Like him, I kind of wish it didn't, but that's just personal opinion).
Overall, IMO, it seems to be a pretty balanced review, though some bias/personal opinion creeps through, I think.
Max.