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iPhone Forcing Open Wireless Networks?
fermion writes "Wired asserts that the iPhone blew up the wireless industry. This article argues that because Apple demanded the opportunity to control their own phone, and ATT née Cingular agreed, other companies are opening up the networks, and Google now has the opportunity to make Android a reality. There are other tidbits. Allegedly Verizon turned Jobs down without even listening to his pitch, a decision they may well regret now that they are hemorrhaging customers. Also, that Motorola and the networks were responsible for the fiasco dubbed the ROKR, something which I believe given how damaged the American version of the RAZR was compared to international version. It also estimates that the iPhone cost upward of $150 million to design, and earns Apple about $200 profit per phone."
You can take a SIM card from any carrier and put it in any phone.
Provided that your phone is un-simlocked, yes. Besides when you say "GSM alone" does it exclude GRPS and UMTS? Cause we have that too. Not sure if we have EDGE tho.
You just got troll'd!
Those carries have been open for a long time: I've been using unlocked GSM phones on them for years. The iPhone is a big step backwards: it's carrier-locked and non-programmable. Far from moving the industry forward, Apple has been taking it backwards.
If you want a nice phone, get an unlocked Nokia N95-3; you get 3G speeds, a 5Mpixel camera, stereo speakers, GPS (works with Google maps), a Safari web browser, and lots more. You aren't locked into a contract or carrier, and you can put in a different SIM card when you travel.
I simply meant that it is not like America where there are different phone connection protocols with different levels of reception depending on where you are, there is just one across the whole of Europe. Of course, if you actually try to use your phone across Europe then they kill you with the roaming charges, but at least it means if you buy an unlocked phone then you can use it anywhere.
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By GSM he probably meant GSM/GPRS/EDGE/UMTS. But there also exceptions, like them. They offer CDMA in the ex-NMT 450 MHz band. The downside, limited set of phones, and you can leave your phone at home if you travel outside the country (and take your GSM with you)... kinda like in the US :)
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Close, but not entirely true. Verzion has agreed to use the GSM LTE standard for it's 4G implementations, not 3G, so it doesn't appear they would be running to cross license anything. They are still committed to CDMA EV-DO for 3G. http://news.vzw.com/news/2007/11/pr2007-11-29.html
As much as I hate Verizon Wireless for crippling their phones, if Verizon had 62.1 million subscribers in June 2007 and 63.7 subscribers as of January 8th, 2008, how can they be "hemorrhaging" customers?
AT&T may be clobbering them, adding new acquisitions to 67.3 million lines (from 63.7 in June 07), but Verizon has a turnover rate of less than 2% and they've increased the total # of subscribers since the iPhone release.
The fact that the iPhone shookup the wireless industry and forced others to innovate and improve is true, but Verizon isn't dying. They DO need to play catchup with AT&T though; AT&T is widening their lead.
Its not just Europe, its the entire world.
:)
I can take my Aussie (where I live) phone and bring it to Turkey (where I am atm) and it will work fine.
I also have the option of swapping SIM cards to a turkish one to save money.
I actually didnt know that the US wasnt like this.
Seems kinda (well *really*) stupid to me.
The thread about whose phone is open and whose is not has no effect on the point of the article. The impact of the iPhone was that the phone maker got to set the rules instead of the service provider. This is a major change in the behavior of the service provider.
Verizon, conversely, expects that everything you would do with your phone should include a network service function. They own services for pictures, video, music, even your calendar and address book. As a result, they have disabled many of the features provided by phone equipment providers. Furthermore, you cannot buy a phone from an equipment provider and then sign up for Verizon service. This is a really terrible situation for the customer and not likely to last once the market starts to gravitate to separate smart phones and configurable services.
Lastly, don't assume that GSM is the solution to all phone service problems. The sim card is a good idea so that phone service is portable. It is a difficult standard to adjust to higher data rates where CDMA is easier. I suspect the GSM folks will get it figured out, but the phone you have today might not be the one you need in a few years. The battle is not yet fully played.
"If all the American people want is security, let them live in prisons." Eisenhower
ATT (Cingular) is GSM, as is a few other companies. They have essentially identical coverage as the other companies, so it will work -- you just won't be able to buy "any ol' SIM"
I don't even see why people are using skype...
As you point out, it's a horrible lock-in protocol, and is tied to a single service for relaying calls to regular phones, a service which isn't very competitively priced.
Personally i use SIP, i have accounts with several providers for outbound calls and i switch whenever a better deal comes along, the reason i have multiple accounts is both for redundancy and because different suppliers offer different rates to different places. I also run my own asterisk pbx, and connect to it using multiple hardware voip phones (cisco 7960s, nokia n95, and a few cheap brandless ones) and have it connected to a physical elephone line.
I wouldn't have any of this flexibility if i was locked in to the skype protocol.
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The landmass of Europe is approximately 10,180,000 square km, the landmass of the United States is approximately 9,826,630 square km.
Your comment displays your ignorance of Europe (much like you pointed out European's ignorance of the United States). Europe is freaking HUGE.
- Europe: 10,180,000 km^2 (3,930,000 sq mi)
- European Union: 4,324,782 km^2 (1,669,807 sq mi)
- Texas: 678,051 km^2 (261,797 sq mi)
- USofA: 9,826,630 km^2 (3,794,066 sq mi)
All data after Wikipedia. Densities differ - true, but still, don't use such exaggerations to support your argument (which is not bad in itself)."Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Handwriting recognition is for the birds. Using a stylus sucks. I have had two Palm OS devices and an iPhone. Now, no one understands better than I that Graffiti sucks. Hard. But handwriting creates certain problems that can't be solved by any software. Lost styli. The need to always use two hands. Difficult editing. (How do you backspace?) Okay, maybe that last one has a software solution. But you see what I'm saying.
I've had my iPhone since release day, and it took me about two weeks to really get comfortable with the soft keyboard. I haven't taken any measurements, but I am quite sure that I can type accurately on it faster than I can write legibly with a pen and paper. And I can get by one handed.
On top of all that, multi-touch is awesome.
Maybe the iPhone isn't for you, but if you haven't gotten one in your hands and tried it out, do it. I couldn't go back to a traditional touch screen. And anyone who tries to foist a stylus on me is going to have to dig it out of his sinus.
-Peter
I live in Switzerland. Every phone I've ever bought (from different carriers) has been sim-unlocked. I think it's possible to get SIM-locked phones, but you can easily get them unlocked. When I leave the country for any significant amount of time (which is often, as you can't spit in Switzerland without hitting three other countries), I buy a local pre-paid SIM card. A few months ago, I went to Cuba for two weeks, and my Swisscom SIM card actually worked, including Internet access (which is kind of a joke - my phone had faster Internet than the local, foreigners-only Internet cafés).
When people say Europe in this context, they are usually talking about Western Europe which is much smaller than the number you quoted.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Those are called SIM-Lock and Netlock. I couldn't find any English sources (I am from Germany) to explain them, so here it goes:
SIM-Lock locks the phone to a certain SIM. It does not work the other way around. So you can put your SIM in any GSM phone and use it. The SIM carries your number and your PIN. It doesn't matter which phone you use. The reason behind this is that the carriers subsidize the phones. With a "normal" contract you mainly pay off the phone with the monthly base charge. That base charge would roughly add up to the value of the phone over the length of the contract.
That changed, when the carriers began to introduce contracts without a monthly fee. With those you have to buy your credits at the store beforehand. And you only pay as much as you like, but then you can only talk as long as you paid before. Back then even the most basic GSM phones cost more than 100 bucks in retail. To sell more they also started subsidizing these kind of contracts. But you could just buy a bunch of phones, throw away the SIM and have a new phone for less. To prevent this from happening they invented the SIM-Lock to a phone to a certain SIM. SIM-Lock is pretty common in Germany.
Netlock ist similar, but it just locks the phone to a certain carrier. Netlock is less common in Germany.
You could go to your carrier and ask them for the code to unlock the phone, but that costs usually about as much as a new phone. Since you bought the phone it is legally yours and you can do as you wish. So dodgy places began offering to unlock them for much less money than the carrier. To unlock your own phone any way you like is perfectly legal. But to offer this service to others is not. They won't throw you in jail, but the carriers could sue you for example.
This all has to do with the marketing that is used to sell phone contracts to people in different countries. For example in Germany it is not allowed to charge people for getting a call. This wouldn't sell anyways, since we are not used to that. The kind of contract that Apple offered the carriers was also new to them. Probabely a reason why Verizon didn't really bother with it.
Apple demanded? Apple gave up potential iPhone sales to people who may have wanted an iPhone but didn't want AT&T. Apple is bricking phones that have been modded to work with different providers or attempt to use 3rd party apps instead of AT&T services. Apple is taking all the heat for this nonsense while AT&T sits back and collects the revenue. From where I sit, it appears that Apple's lips are firmly affixed to AT&T's backside.
The whole "we're opening up out networks" crap is just that. Cingular/AT&T's network has always been 'open' so long as you are willing to supply your own unlocked phone. I know. I've been doing that for years. The iPhone is a move in the other direction. Once you spend big bucks on one, you are much less likely to switch away from AT&T. In my case, when I travel abroad, I re-chip my phone (a RAZR) with a local account. An iPhone would be useless to me. I wonder how many other sales to people who travel a lot and want such features (typically higher income) Apple lost.
Have gnu, will travel.
Nobody talks about Helio, but they did most of the iPhone things before the iPhone, and better.
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3G networking - Helio has it, Apple doesn't.
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Social networking integration - Helio has it ("Myspace integration"), Apple doesn't.
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GPS/map/social networking Helio has it ("Buddy Beacon"), Apple doesn't even have GPS.
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Video camera Helio has it, Apple doesn't.
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Music downloads Helio does them over the air, Apple doesn't.
They both have music, video, phone, camera, etc.Helio also has much more Web integration (IM, POP email, RSS, etc.) than the iPhone. The problem is that they had to put a pop-out QWERTY keyboard in the thing to deal with all the web stuff.
the Lisa (with its "borrowed" GUI design courtesy of Xerox labs)
No.
Apple licensed some concepts from Xerox and greatly developed others. Jef Raskin was an Apple employee who, more than just about anyone, developed the GUI concept from the ground up.
Have you ever seen a Xerox GUI in action? It's not pretty and it's barely usable. Apple brought a lot to that metaphor but they'd already done a lot of work on the Mac and GUI. For some reason people like yourself either don't know that or forget it, preferring to believe that the Mac GUI sprang fully formed in Xerox and was cruelly stolen by Apple. It's a lie, often repeated but that doesn't make it any less a lie.
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