Anders Rundgren wrote:
You are absolutely right! The question is then: Will it happen?
How and why? That is of course impossible to know at this
stage but I can imagine that there will be operators that will
market "untangled" subscriptions. Actually the whole phone
market is in a giant transformation when the services are on the
Internet rather than in the regulated "phone nets". And then comes
things like WLAN, VoIP, Skype etc. that totally changes the
fundamentals of the business. My guess is that big organizations
will not accept that their employees use expensive operator-
controlled lines if they already have a working WLAN.
I went through an interesting paradigm shift in this area recently.
Last December, I bought a Motorola v710 phone and extended my
contract with Verizon for 2 more years [1] to get the subsidized
price on the phone. Well, this phone was advertised as having
everything anyone could ever want - PDA, calendar, contact list,
Bluetooth, camera, MP3 player, TF (small version of SD) card
slot, you name it, the phone was advertised to have it.
So, I get the phone home and find out some disturbing things.
One is that the Bluetooth implementation on the phone only
lets me use a headset for audio and use the Bluetooth as a
modem - no object transfer of things like contact lists, data
files, etc... Verizon has disabled those Bluetooth features
for "security reasons" [2]. The camera on the phone sucks. I
mean, it really sucks - my cheap 640X480 Intel webcam takes
better pictures than this 1.2MP camera. The phone can not play
ringtones off of the TF card, only from the phone's (limited)
internal memory. A recent firmware update from Verizon even
disables transferring audio files from the TF card to the
phone's internal memory, so that YOU HAVE TO PAY VERIZON FOR
EACH RINGTONE YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD INTO THE PHONE. I guess
this is also for "security" reasons. So, I look into what it
would take to write my own software for the phone - well, all
code that goes into the phone needs to be signed for the
particular phone *AND* you need to pay a per-copy license fee
to get your copy signed. Qualcom just loves this (the phone
is based on BREW, which, if you replace the "B" with the
letters "SC" you'll understand what Qualcom and Verizon are
doing to the customers).
OK, enough is enough - the hassles of a closed, proprietary
phone are just not worth it to me, so I went out and bought
an HP iPAQ - it's got WiFi and Bluetooth, a 1.2MP camera,
an MP3 player, an SD card slot, and, best of all, no restrictions
on data transfer between storage devices or the network, it
works on the WiFi networks that are in the places that I want
to use it, and the cost of software development for it is
almost zero.
I'm waiting for the day that there will be a big revolution in
this country (US) when people will finally get fed up with
the strong-arm tactics of the cellular carriers and the idiocy
of having multiple, incompatible cellular systems.
mike
[1] Verizon has very good cellular coverage where I live, and
so as strictly a radio cellular carrier, they are fine for
my needs. I just wish they would keep their fingers out of
my phone's firmware.
[2] The "security" of their bottom line, not any "security" in
the technical sense, especially since other carriers that
have deployed the v710 don't have such restrictions on it's
feature set.
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