Friday Night Rant: Crappy North American Cell Phones
Danny Choo just got a new cell phone. I have gadget envy.
This cellphone is loaded to the hilt with features: GPS, 400×240 WQVGA display, 2 mega-pixel camera, MiniSD slot, 2Mbps net connection, radio receiver and on and on and on…
Why doesn’t North America have phones like these? Why are our networks so damn slow to adopt new technologies?
Come to think of it…
- Land-mass; Canada and the United States are much, much larger than most european and asian countries. The costs and risks of rolling out new technologies across each country are enormous.
- State-owned networks; I believe many of the european and asian states still have state-owned and operated networks. The costs of upgrading networks are most likely subsidized by the government.
- FCC radio spectrum auctions; Can you believe the US gov’t raised $14 BILLION dollars by licensing radio air space? T-Mobile alone spent over $4 billion. That’s quite a bit of money to shell out before spending a single penny on rolling out technology to actually take advantage of the license.
So that explains the networks, but what about the phones themselves? Why are we pre-occupied with form over function phones like the RAZR or PEBL from Motorola? I’d like to get my paws on something that has a nice mix of looks and features without having to sell one of my kidneys in order to get it.
Rant’s over and I still want a fancy pants cell phone. I even have my next phone picked out, a coming-soon-to-Europe-but-maybe-never-to-Canada BenQ-Siemens SL91.
