Mod this up, it's entirely true.
In the UK, they started about 8 years ago selling phones for 30 or so, with pay-per-call, no contract deals. That didn't catch on, they were making a loss on the phones because lots of people just bought the phone "for emergincies" - I did. About 6 months later, they had massive advertising campaigns, with SMS text messaging, trying to appeal to teenagers, and it's worked. Most teenagers now have a phone, it's on an ordinary contract (about 13 a month?). The next thing was changing the colouror your phone, then the colour of the display, and the buttons. Then we got WAP (~internet) on there, and with a proper screen you could surf pr0n, in B+W, at the back of the class;-) That was probably about 4 years ago.
Now we've got picture messaging, and phones smaller than a very small thing, and Java games. I think the reason the US is slower to catch on is the vast area - in the UK, there's about 90% + coverage for phones, in the US the investment required for this coverage would be massive, so there's something of a vicious circle.
What's the signal coverage like, btw? If I broke down on the highway in New Mexico, could I use my phone?
Before the knoppix server dies, here's the tracker for the bittorrent so everyone can download knoppix.
here for the bittorrent client.
Also, MandrakeMove torrent
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Mod this up, it's entirely true. In the UK, they started about 8 years ago selling phones for 30 or so, with pay-per-call, no contract deals. That didn't catch on, they were making a loss on the phones because lots of people just bought the phone "for emergincies" - I did. About 6 months later, they had massive advertising campaigns, with SMS text messaging, trying to appeal to teenagers, and it's worked. Most teenagers now have a phone, it's on an ordinary contract (about 13 a month?). The next thing was changing the colouror your phone, then the colour of the display, and the buttons. Then we got WAP (~internet) on there, and with a proper screen you could surf pr0n, in B+W, at the back of the class ;-) That was probably about 4 years ago.
Now we've got picture messaging, and phones smaller than a very small thing, and Java games. I think the reason the US is slower to catch on is the vast area - in the UK, there's about 90% + coverage for phones, in the US the investment required for this coverage would be massive, so there's something of a vicious circle.
What's the signal coverage like, btw? If I broke down on the highway in New Mexico, could I use my phone?
Before the knoppix server dies, here's the tracker for the bittorrent so everyone can download knoppix.
here for the bittorrent client.
Also, MandrakeMove torrent
You can download Knoppix with BitTorrent here, it should be faster than FTP.