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What's Keeping US Phones In the Stone Age?
knapper_tech writes "After seeing the iPhone introduction, I was totally confused by how much excitement it generated in the US. It offered no features I could see beyond my Casio W41CA's capabilities. I had a lot of apprehension towards the idea of a virtual keypad and the bare screen looked like a scratch magnet. Looks aren't enough. Finally, the price is ridiculous. The device is an order of magnitude more expensive than my now year-old Keitai even with a two-year contract. After returning to the US from Japan, I've come to realize the horrible truth behind iPhone's buzz. Over the year I was gone, US phones haven't really done anything. Providers push a minuscule lineup of uninspiring designs and then charge unbelievable prices for even basic things like text messages. I was greeted at every kiosk by more tired clamshells built to last until obsolescence, and money can't buy a replacement for my W41CA." Read on as this reader proposes and dismissed a number of possible explanations for the difference in cell-phone markets between the US and Japan. He concludes with, "It seems to me more like competition is non-existent and US providers are ramming yesteryear's designs down our throats while charging us an arm and a leg! Someone please give me some insight."
I finally broke down and got a $20 Virgin phone to at least get me connected until I get over my initial shock. In short, American phones suck, and iPhone is hopefully a wakeup call to US providers and customers. Why is the American phone situation so depressing?
Before I left for Japan about a year ago, I was using a Nokia 3160. It cost me $40 US and I had to sign a one year contract that Cingular later decided was a two-year contract. I was paying about $40 a month for service and had extra fees for SMS messages.
After I got to Kyoto, I quickly ended up at an AU shop and landed a Casio W41CA. It does email, music, pc web browsing, gps, fm radio, tv, phone-wallet, pictures (2megapixel), videos, calculator etc. I walked out of the store for less than ¥5000 (about $41) including activation fees, and I was only paying slightly over ¥4000 (about $33) per month. That included ¥3000 for a voice plan I rarely used and ¥1000 for effectively unlimited data (emails and internet).
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the costs facing American mobile providers can explain the huge technology and cost gap between the US and Japan. Why are we paying so much for such basic features?
At first, I thought maybe it was something to do with network infrastructure. The US is a huge land area and Japan is very tiny. However, Japan would have lots of towers because of the terrain. Imagine something like Colorado covered in metropolitan area. Also, even though places like rural New Mexico exist, nobody has an obligation to cover them, and from the look of coverage maps, no providers do. Operating a US network that reaches 40% of the nation's population requires nowhere near reaching 40% of the land area. The coverage explanation alone isn't enough.
Another possibility was the notion that because Americans keep their phones until they break, phone companies don't focus much on selling cutting edge phones and won't dare ship a spin-chassis to Oklahoma. However, with the contract life longer, the cost of the phone could be spread out over a longer period. If Americans like phones that are built to last and then let them last, the phones should be really cheap. From my perspective, they are ridiculously priced, so this argument also fails.
The next explanation I turned to is that people in the US tend to want winners. We like one ring to rule them all and one phone to establish all of what is good in phone fashion for the next three years. However, Motorola's sales are sagging as the population got tired of dime-a-dozen RAZR's and subsequent knockoffs. Apparently, we have more fashion sense or at least desire for individuality than to keep buying hundreds of millions of the same design. Arguing that the US market tends to gravitate to one phone and then champion it is not making Motorola money.
At last I started to wonder if it was because Americans buy less phones as a whole, making the cost of marketing as many different models as the Japanese prohibitive. However, with something like three times the population, the US should be more than enough market for all the glittery treasures of Akiba. What is the problem?
I'm out of leads at this point. It's not like the FCC is charging Cingular and Verizon billions of dollars per year and the costs are getting passed on to the consumer. Japanese don't have genetically superior cellphone taste. I remember that there was talk of how fierce mobile competition was and how it was hurting mobile providers' earnings. However, if Japanese companies can make money at those prices while selling those phones, what's the problem in the US? It seems to me more like competition is non-existent and US providers are ramming yesteryear's designs down our throats while charging us an arm and a leg! Someone please give me some insight.
I finally broke down and got a $20 Virgin phone to at least get me connected until I get over my initial shock. In short, American phones suck, and iPhone is hopefully a wakeup call to US providers and customers. Why is the American phone situation so depressing?
Before I left for Japan about a year ago, I was using a Nokia 3160. It cost me $40 US and I had to sign a one year contract that Cingular later decided was a two-year contract. I was paying about $40 a month for service and had extra fees for SMS messages.
After I got to Kyoto, I quickly ended up at an AU shop and landed a Casio W41CA. It does email, music, pc web browsing, gps, fm radio, tv, phone-wallet, pictures (2megapixel), videos, calculator etc. I walked out of the store for less than ¥5000 (about $41) including activation fees, and I was only paying slightly over ¥4000 (about $33) per month. That included ¥3000 for a voice plan I rarely used and ¥1000 for effectively unlimited data (emails and internet).
Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the costs facing American mobile providers can explain the huge technology and cost gap between the US and Japan. Why are we paying so much for such basic features?
At first, I thought maybe it was something to do with network infrastructure. The US is a huge land area and Japan is very tiny. However, Japan would have lots of towers because of the terrain. Imagine something like Colorado covered in metropolitan area. Also, even though places like rural New Mexico exist, nobody has an obligation to cover them, and from the look of coverage maps, no providers do. Operating a US network that reaches 40% of the nation's population requires nowhere near reaching 40% of the land area. The coverage explanation alone isn't enough.
Another possibility was the notion that because Americans keep their phones until they break, phone companies don't focus much on selling cutting edge phones and won't dare ship a spin-chassis to Oklahoma. However, with the contract life longer, the cost of the phone could be spread out over a longer period. If Americans like phones that are built to last and then let them last, the phones should be really cheap. From my perspective, they are ridiculously priced, so this argument also fails.
The next explanation I turned to is that people in the US tend to want winners. We like one ring to rule them all and one phone to establish all of what is good in phone fashion for the next three years. However, Motorola's sales are sagging as the population got tired of dime-a-dozen RAZR's and subsequent knockoffs. Apparently, we have more fashion sense or at least desire for individuality than to keep buying hundreds of millions of the same design. Arguing that the US market tends to gravitate to one phone and then champion it is not making Motorola money.
At last I started to wonder if it was because Americans buy less phones as a whole, making the cost of marketing as many different models as the Japanese prohibitive. However, with something like three times the population, the US should be more than enough market for all the glittery treasures of Akiba. What is the problem?
I'm out of leads at this point. It's not like the FCC is charging Cingular and Verizon billions of dollars per year and the costs are getting passed on to the consumer. Japanese don't have genetically superior cellphone taste. I remember that there was talk of how fierce mobile competition was and how it was hurting mobile providers' earnings. However, if Japanese companies can make money at those prices while selling those phones, what's the problem in the US? It seems to me more like competition is non-existent and US providers are ramming yesteryear's designs down our throats while charging us an arm and a leg! Someone please give me some insight.
American's are more willing to pay for their techy gadgets. If the overpriced stuff here was perceived as that overpriced, no one would buy it, and the cell companies would be forced to sell their gadgets cheaper or with more features. I don't see this changing in the near future because we are accustomed to the pricing companies like Cingular and Sprint give us.
SmartBox
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.
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.
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
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).
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."
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
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Actually 10p is the normal rate for pay-as-you-go texts over here (regardless of what that article says). Regular texters can also get a pay-as-you-go text pack (where you buy a lot of texts at once) or sign up for a contract (where you usually get lots of free texts).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Japan HAS been stuck in a recession for about 10 years. That doesn't invalidate their products though. Can you really look at a cel phone with an easy to use interface, big bright OLED full color screens on the inside and out, a 5MP camera, built-in e-wallet (thumbprint-scan released smartcard wallet) function, high speed internet, an HTML-compatible web browser, MP3 playback, online chatting, smooth fullscreen video conferencing, AND solid service throughout the country and still call it inferior? I'd take one in a second, and those features aren't even so remarkable anymore...
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
The premise underlying most iPhone criticism comes down to judging every device as merely the sum of its parts. People (pundits and punters) look at the bulletted feature list and say "other phones can do more". Try sitting down with an iPhone, and really using it. The added value is in usability-- not just slick and attractive interfaces, but ones that let you use the device quickly and easily.
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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.
Yes. I think the 25p relates to max roaming charges across the EU, doesn't it? 10p for a text is much more common in UK.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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?
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. He wasn't comparing it to Europe. Our prices are bad, if what you said is true, Europe's is insane.
2. Materials other than plastic scratch. It is very early in its life...we will have to see how scratch resistant it is.
3. The retail price of the iPhone is not even close to manufacturing costs. People have cracked the thing open and saw that its components aren't worth half what people are paying for it.
4. Japan's market for cell phones is better. They ARE confused what the big deal about the iPhone is because it lacks the features of their phones. Yes, there are some people who go overboard with Japan. This is not one of those cases.
5. Finally, a article that is negative about Apple or iPhone is not an attack on you, your family, or your dog. Try to gain a little objectivity.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
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.
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).
Counterpoints:
iPhone's screen is bigger. Visual Voicemail. The fold-out keyboard makes you look like a dork when you use it. Typing with your thumbs is awkward slow.
And last but not least: some of us *prefer* software buttons to hardware buttons for several reasons. What happens when the "Z" key breaks? You can't type the letter "Z" anymore: this functionality isn't duplicated anywhere. Also, what happens when someone writes an application with a great new feature that you want a shortcut to? Oh noez...I don't have a button for that. Or even better, I have to remember a whole bunch of alt/ctrl/function+key combos for things...that's soooooo much better.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
"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
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"
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.
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!
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.
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.
Q.
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.
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
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 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.
First, we'll check out your carefully-selected feature comparison.
iPhone - Treo
128MB - 64MB
4-8 GB Hard Drive - 2GB SD Slot
Visual Voicemail - No, thank god.*
Auto-Landscape Mode - Unnecessary (square aspect ratio)
Phone Numbers from Webpages - Yep
Integration with Movie/Music Service (iTunes) - No, thank god.*
Easy "Pinch" and "Spin" Navigation - Actual keyboard and a touchscreen
Auto-Threading of SMS Conversations - Yep
On-Screen Conferencing options - Yep
Safari Browser with "Zoom on Element" Features - So many browsers I can't be bothered to list them here.
Rich email client - Yep. Dozens.
Smooth Integration with Google Maps, Youtube, and Mac Widgets - Yes, no (thank god), and no (thank god).
Next, I'll point out the price of this phone.
Price of the Treo 650 (which stacks up to the iphone except for itunes and youtube): $150 on eBay. Unlocked.
So, youtube and itunes. Worth a couple hundred bucks to you?
* Items with asterisks require proprietary service agreements to be useful. Try getting "visual voicemail" on any carrier but at&t. Also, AKAImBatman refers to "Integration with Movie/Music Service" as though it can be other than iTunes, which isn't the case. It's iTunes or gtfo, and I consider it disingenuous not to specify that.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Let's see here.
...and according to the respective product sheets, the Casio actually does far less, with worse battery life.
W41CA: 400x240 screen
iPhone: 480x320 screen
W41CA: 70mb of memory
iPhone: 4 or 8gb of memory
W41CA: 49 x 103 x 22mm, 126g
iPhone: 61 x 115 x 11.6mm, 135g
But the specs alone don't tell the story; the real story is in the implementation. It's arguable that the iPhone does nothing new, but the way it does it is really the key. Try using one, you'll see what I mean.
I've been to Japan on a number of occasions, and I'm actually returning there at the end of August. The Japanese certainly do love their gadgets, but the idea that they are any more than at best 6 months ahead of the US market is just not accurate.
Storm
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
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.
Most of the phones sold in Europe are triple- or even quad-band phones, which work anywhere GSM is supported (even the US!)
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.
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'?
Nokia E70
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
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
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.
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
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
My cell also works as a telephone!
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
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.