{"id":36,"date":"2006-09-22T23:47:17","date_gmt":"2006-09-23T06:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/singchan.com\/2006\/09\/22\/friday-night-rant-crappy-north-american-cell-phones\/"},"modified":"2006-09-23T09:50:52","modified_gmt":"2006-09-23T16:50:52","slug":"friday-night-rant-crappy-north-american-cell-phones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/2006\/09\/22\/friday-night-rant-crappy-north-american-cell-phones\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Night Rant: Crappy North American Cell Phones"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a target=\"_blank\" title=\"Read Danny's blog entry about his new cell phone.\" href=\"http:\/\/www.dannychoo.com\/blog_entry\/eng\/481\/W41CA\/\">Danny Choo just got a new cell phone<\/a>. I have gadget envy.<\/p>\n<p>This cellphone is loaded to the hilt with features: GPS, 400&#215;240 WQVGA display, 2 mega-pixel camera, MiniSD slot, 2Mbps net connection, radio receiver and on and on and on&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Why doesn&#8217;t North America have phones like these? Why are our networks so damn slow to adopt new technologies?<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Come to think of it&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"Read about the latest FCC spectrum auction.\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.eetimes.com\/rss\/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=193003566\">FCC radio spectrum auctions<\/a>; Can you believe the US gov&#8217;t raised $14 BILLION dollars by licensing radio air space? T-Mobile alone spent over $4 billion. That&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So that explains the networks, but what about the phones themselves? Why are we pre-occupied with form over function phones like the <a target=\"_blank\" title=\"Moto RAZR product page\" href=\"http:\/\/direct.motorola.com\/ENS\/web_producthome.asp?Country=CND&#038;language=ENS&#038;productid=30365\">RAZR<\/a> or <a title=\"Moto PEBL product page\" href=\"http:\/\/direct.motorola.com\/ENS\/web_producthome.asp?Country=CND&#038;language=ENS&#038;productid=30591\">PEBL<\/a> from Motorola? I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Rant&#8217;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 <a rel=\"lightbox\" title=\"BenQ-Siemens SL91 phone in its docking station.\" href=\"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2006\/09\/benq-siemens_sl91.jpg\">BenQ-Siemens SL91<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Danny Choo just got a new cell phone. I have gadget envy. This cellphone is loaded to the hilt with features: GPS, 400&#215;240 WQVGA display, 2 mega-pixel camera, MiniSD slot, 2Mbps net connection, radio receiver and on and on and on&#8230; Why doesn&#8217;t North America have phones like these? Why are our networks so damn [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gadgets","category-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43,"href":"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/43"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/singchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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