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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
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...
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.
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
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?
and my women to ... ;-)
Be overweight, bitchy and expensive? Like most American women? ;-)
Sorry, that statement made me think of the following joke, hence my statement:
In heaven the police are English,
the French are the cooks,
the wives are Japanese,
all houses are American,
the Italians are the lovers,
and everything is organized by the Germans.
In hell the English are the cooks,
the French are the police,
the wives are American,
the houses are Japanese,
the Germans are the lovers,
and everything is organized by the Italians.
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
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.
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.
And here I thought everyone was well-versed on the sad state of corporate America. How insightful! Profit is obviously the issue. Its not like European companies, or Japanese companies who the parent article uses as a direct comparison, are motivated by profit! Profit must be an entirely US-centric concept. It must be stopped.
Oh - and congratulations on your hip and edgy use of the word "sheeple." It truely marks you as someone who refuses to follow the crowd. You're a rebel. A deviant. Someone who thinks on their own terms and refuses to follow trends. In fact, you're so cutting-edge that Scion has a commercial just for you! You don't get that kind of treatment unless you're ahead of the curve.
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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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.
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).
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
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).
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.
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.
Q.
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.
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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.
Storm
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.
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
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.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.