What is Digg?122 Comments
- CraigJ, on 10/24/2007, -4/+50Verizon, AT&T, etc. are afraid of competition. If they could win new customers based on superior service they would, but they can't, so they lock you in and treat you like a criminal if you want to leave, and sue the successful competition (Vonage, for example) because that is apparently easies than innovation.
- byttle, on 10/23/2007, -1/+35Charging for texting is ridiculous...
- inactive, on 10/23/2007, -6/+31OpenMoko!
- BarbaraKolbe, on 10/23/2007, -3/+26Can Walt in the Wall Street Journal get their attention? Here's hoping... dugg!
- silverghozt, on 10/23/2007, -5/+25Walt is EXACTLY right.
- mandarin, on 10/23/2007, -1/+17Cell phone bills are just too much...I rarely use mine and I still pay more than 50$ a month.
- unreal32, on 10/23/2007, -2/+15Dup: http://digg.com/Dup_Get_over_it_crybaby
- Micktion, on 10/23/2007, -0/+12I've done a bit of Smartphone/windows mobile development. Microsoft has made the Windows Mobile platform such that it is up to the operator (the phone manufactorer and/or the mobile service provider) as to how locked down the phone is. It can be completely open or it can be locked down such that no app can even be loaded on to the device without being digitally signed.
The development tools are all freely available from Microsoft at least in trial version. I believe the free version of Visual Studio .NET will also allow you to do dev work for mobile devices. Considering the potential openess of the OS, the availability of development tools and the ease of development it's probably the only mobile phone development platform at the moment that gives small players a real shot.
In one form or another it's had all the features of the IPhone for the last 4 years, although admittedly the slick interface of the IPhone is not much of a comparison to Windows Mobile to date. Although I do believe there are really great features in store down the track.
It's just unfortunate that the platform doesn't seem to have made much market penetration. I think one of the major reasons for that is Microsoft wanted to fashion the mobile OS to work similiar "like we do with (desktop) computers" and most of the players in the market have not gone for it precisely because they don't want a free for all mobile platform, they want it locked down and under their control.
So as not to get flamed I will admit the other reason for Windows Mobile's lack of success has been the quality of what has been shipped to market. Microsoft did not do what Apple did. They simply licensed source code for the OS to 3rd party players like IMate and HTC. Whether it be Microsofts code, or the 3rd party modifications the end result in many instances has been less than ideal. Although having said all that I have an IMate SPL now and it's pretty much perfect. - prisoner24601, on 10/23/2007, -2/+11Look at AT&T's "double dipping" with the iPhone. People pay full price and yet are locked into a two-year contract anyway. That's absurd. Obviously the market has an inefficiency that needs to be resolved and Mossberg's comparison to ISP's having ZERO control over hardware is a perfectly rational example of the way things should be and only will be when we demand it.
- MWeather, on 10/23/2007, -0/+8I'll stop whining when the entire wireless spectrum is opened up, and that includes TV!
- NinjaBoy, on 10/23/2007, -1/+8I just wish it wasn't $300. Thats a months rent for me.
- superkendall, on 10/23/2007, -0/+6I agree with what Walt says, but how do you untangle the mess?
Fixing the phone company was easy by comparison, because there you had one company (AT&T) that you could break into several. But here we have multiple independent companies, and you have multiple forms of networks as well.
Do you make the whole industry switch to GSM? Or CDMA? Neither seems very fair to half the companies that have paid a huge amount to develop whichever infrastructure you do not pick. Do you mandate all phones be able to support both networks? As a phone user, I find the prospect of mandated cruft in my handset dreadful.
It's one thing to complain about how things are, but where are the proposed solutions that would actually work?
The one course of action I can see helping is mandate CDMA operators include something like a SIM for all CDMA phones, and then to make it mandatory for providers and handset makers to allow a SIM from any company using the network the phone supports work with any phone that can use that network. That doesn't solve all the problems he listed but I think it gets you close enough by letting people really have an open market for phones not tied as strongly to carriers. - thinksInCode, on 10/23/2007, -0/+6Yeah, that cracked me up, too.
But it is unimpaired, in the sense that the carrier doesn't lock or disable some features. They do that with a lot of other phones. Still, I'm with you. The iPhone is a very impaired product, but that hopefully will change when the SDK is released in February. - sephiroth99, on 10/23/2007, -1/+7from the article : "The Internet provider gets paid simply for its contribution to the mix: providing your Internet connection. But, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t control what is connected to the network, or carried over the network."
... yet - Ramble, on 10/23/2007, -1/+7Make them switch to GSM, you know, the standard the rest of the world uses.
- SirBotchness, on 10/23/2007, -0/+5This will change nothing, but its a good article.
- MWeather, on 10/22/2007, -1/+6That's the developer version. The consumer version will presumably be cheaper.
On a side note, where do you live that you only pay $300 rent? - inactive, on 10/23/2007, -0/+5Man... I clicked on that :(
- dvdrtrgn, on 10/23/2007, -1/+6Your sense of amazement entitles me.
- pintomp3, on 10/23/2007, -0/+5why not go pre-paid?
- thinksInCode, on 10/23/2007, -1/+6$300!? Where do you live? My monthly rent is $1305!! Gotta love Massachusetts...
- CraigJ, on 10/23/2007, -2/+6Why? He says not one bad thing about Apple in the article. The part about making a deal with the Devil is a dig on AT&T, not Apple.
- jonshipman, on 10/23/2007, -0/+4but txts are like what? 5 bytes? The real issue is why are we paying $0.15 for every 5 bytes we send?
- Spoomeister, on 10/23/2007, -1/+5I have plenty of openness and freedom regarding cellphones.
1. I can buy one, or not. Believe it or not, people can - even in the 21st century! - get by without a cellphone.
2. I can find any combo of phone and plan that I like, in order to be able to make and receive calls whenever and wherever I like. A little comparison shopping lets me find that.
3. I can even get a pre-paid phone card for just the minutes I need.
Texting, video, apps, etc. are all still in the realm of nice to have, not vital. The approach to people who dislike iPhone+AT&T should not be, "buy an iPhone, then hack it". It should be, "don't buy an iPhone, write them to tell them why if it makes you feel better, and buy the phone you need, not the trendy eye-candy - excuse me, iCandy". People get so easily sucked up into marketing hype that they end up buying things they know they don't want, then turn around and complain that they want more. You bought what the company wanted to sell you, they made money, they're done. How does this "free my phone" nonsense work if Apple is getting their several hundred bucks anyway? - scabbers, on 10/23/2007, -6/+10He called the iphone an "unimpaired product" lol.
- jonshipman, on 10/23/2007, -0/+3T-Mobile
39.99 USD for unlimited calling to any 5 numbers +300 anytime minutes
unlimited 9pm-6am
unlimited weekends
4.99 USD for 400 SMS/MMS a month - inactive, on 10/23/2007, -1/+4Mossberg is a hack, an old one
- Maciula, on 10/23/2007, -1/+4Abso-*****'lutly! AT&T gives 200 msgs with iPhone plan, with my usage I'd be done in 8-10 days. I'm sticking to my unlimited data plan from T-mobile
- EtherGnat, on 10/23/2007, -0/+3Verizon's text messaging rates are market up at least 7,314% over their data rates. Highway robbery, considering they're undoubtedly making a tidy profit on data rates. Also I believe in Europe only the sender is charged for a text message, which seems more fair.
http://digg.com/offbeat_news/Why_Are_Text_Messages ... - superkendall, on 10/22/2007, -0/+3That's only with the cheapest plan, other iPhone plans give you unlimited messaging. Since I only use about eight a month myself I like being able to pay less for limited text messaging support.
- cnot3, on 10/23/2007, -0/+3idk, it porbably costs them an awful lot to send a couple hundred bytes of data over their network... at least fifteen cents, if not twenty...
- catylist, on 10/23/2007, -0/+2its bad when texting is more expensive than sending them an email
- neodorian, on 10/23/2007, -0/+2In fairness, that $200 was theoretically kicked in as rebates when you signed your contract. They give the rebates knowing that they will make a certain profit from you over the course of 2 years or whatever. Since they won't make that profit without the 2 years of charges, they write the contract to make the rebates dependent on 2 years of service.
- kilofox, on 10/23/2007, -0/+2Exactly.... can you believe how stupid people are? The problem lies that people want a subsidized phone AND no contract. Folks.. it doesnt work that way.
- laaabaseball, on 10/24/2007, -0/+2Now he's copying Leo Laporte!
http://leoville.com/blog/2007/09/29/1037/
Same concept - jessi74, on 10/22/2007, -0/+2Agreed; go pre-paid if they have coverage in your area. NET10 in particular has low prices (though middling customer service). 10 cents a minute, 5 cents a text. Must add $200 of minutes a year; unused minutes roll over.
Limited coverage and phone choices, as well as locked phones are the downsides (and you can't use unlocked phones with their SIMs. Sucks) - CraigJ, on 10/23/2007, -0/+2I respectfully disagree. FTA:
To my knowledge, only one phone maker, Apple Inc., has been permitted to introduce a cellphone with the cooperation of a U.S. carrier without that carrier having any say in the hardware and software design of the product. And that one example, the iPhone, was a special case, because Apple is currently the hottest digital brand on earth, with its own multibillion-dollar online and physical retail network.
Even so, Apple had to make a deal with the devil to gain the freedom to offer an unimpaired product directly to users. It gave AT&T exclusive rights to be the iPhone’s U.S. network for an undisclosed period of years. It has locked and relocked the phone to make sure consumers can’t override that restriction. This arrangement reportedly brings Apple regular fees from AT&T, but penalizes people who live in areas with poor AT&T coverage.
Apple has also, so far, barred users from installing third-party programs on the iPhone, though the company announced last week it will open the phone to such programs early next year. (Web-based iPhone programs–those that run inside the Web browser–have been available from day one.)
These restrictions have rubbed some of the luster off the best-designed handheld computer ever made. - frsrblch, on 10/23/2007, -0/+2And that's why I don't text. I can call somebody, and have it included in the basic rate plan, but God forbid if I should use a small fraction of that network usage to send a text.
- CraigJ, on 10/23/2007, -0/+2No. I want to pick my phone, pay the manufacture for it and pick my carrier. I do not want nor need subsidized phones, non do I want a long term contract. Further, I want GOOD service from my carrier, for which I will gladly pay.
- antdude, on 10/22/2007, -1/+3They must want money and power. :(
- webyatri, on 10/23/2007, -0/+2I moved to pay as you go a year back and end up using up 100-150 minutes for 10-15 dollars every month. Earlier I would pay 35 dollars for the same usage. Of course the reception and coverage sucks. But that's what you get for being in the worst and costliest cell phone service region in the world i.e. USA.
I have used much,much better service with cheaper and latest cell phones for less than half of what I am paying per minute right now(10 c per minute).
US cell phone consumer is one of the worst off in the world. I bet you in a decade Africans roaming in the jungles will find our cell phone service primitive. - dvdrtrgn, on 10/23/2007, -1/+3No. Really, who do you work for?
- tempusrob, on 10/22/2007, -0/+2That's most of the rest of the world, dude, not just "some country in Asia."
- Micktion, on 10/23/2007, -1/+3Well I haven't heard such things other than from sales floor personell who've chosen a device to sell in their shop that turned out to be not so good and trust me the average sales person in a mobile phone shop wouldn't know good application architecture if it slapped him round in the face, so I take their feedback with a dose of salts.
From my experience the problems seem vendor specific and more commonly particular to a device. I've owned half a dozen of these and for the most part my problems have been mostly hardware related, like poor reception, battery died after 12 months, headset jacked packed up etc. There have been software problems but they weren't problems common across all devices and furthermore I've found firmware (OS) updates from the 3rd party vendor eventually came and rectified the issue. This says to me that it's most likely the customisation of the OS and probably not Microsoft's code.
There's alot of problems I think with Microsoft's model for windows approach that's made it not that suitable for most. Like for instance having every device with different specs, screen sizes etc, doesn't make it easy for developers and from the users perspective I can see at times I've needed to perform technical tasks on phones, like OS updates that's a little too tricky for your average joe. A lot of people when faced with this probably end up just taking it back to the shop and say give me a Sony please.
But a world full of Sony phones is never going to make geeks happy and neither will a world full of IPhones as is being demonstrated by all the articles similarly themed to this one. So I don't think MS is close to being out of the game. They've come from behind many times in the past to eventually dominate a market they were initially discounted from.
I actually think this is really important because I think nearly everyone can see the day coming where desktop and mobile platforms will fuse together in an undistinguishable way.
Where are we going to end up? In a computing world where only major players can write native applications? I'm sure the likes of Google and Apple will love that. For Google it means all 3rd party native client development will be extinguished, leaving the server side the only option and as they are kings of server side development that leaves them ruling the roost. Apple has always wanted to sell beautiful hardware running software completely controlled by them. Suits them just fine to keep the status quo in the mobile market. If thats what we all want to see happen, well just keep bagging out MS and buy Apple, Sony or Nokia instead and stop your bitching about native client development lock downs, just develop server side or get out of development completely. - angedinoir, on 10/23/2007, -0/+2Well, except for comcast, which blocks bit-torrent traffic and some political emails.
- dvdrtrgn, on 10/22/2007, -1/+3Who do you work for? I'd say paying $1000 for a year of cell service (and getting soaked $200 for leaving) is more than subsidizing their fat asses.
- flaminio, on 10/22/2007, -0/+2 Meh.... If someone actually think consumers care, someone would offer it.
- aduzik, on 10/23/2007, -0/+1I'm thinking you haven't used one, then. I'm about the biggest Mac fanboy you'll find. I bought an iPhone on day one and I pre-ordered Leopard last week. But Windows Mobile is impressive. In fact, there's a lot to like across the entire Windows CE product line. Being able to write apps for Windows Mobile devices with the .NET framework is fantastic. I'm no Microsoft lover, but you have to give them credit when they do something good.
- BHSPitMonkey, on 10/23/2007, -0/+1Not really; With most phones that are locked down, you're SOL if you want to do anything about it. Yes, the iPhone ships with a pair of shackles, but it apparently takes little effort to have your way with it if you so choose.
- neodorian, on 10/22/2007, -0/+1@johnshipman: because people will pay it.
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