I have a confession to make. I’m bi-carrier. Like many tech folks, I subscribe to more than one cellular phone carrier. I’m not as hardcore as some with their carrier threesomes or foursomes but I’m definitely not monogamous when it comes to carriers.
I’ve come to the realization that both of my cell phones are long in the tooth. I have a Nokia N95 8GB on AT&T and a Blackberry Storm on Verizon. The Nokia, though a great phone, has long outlived its usefulness. It does just about everything current phones do (quiet as it’s kept) but the user experience lags behind my many generations. The Storm, on the other hand, is just an awful phone. Yes, I have the 5.0 OS and it’s still a sad, sad tribute to RIM’s loss at how to respond to the iPhone. I’m pretty sure most iPhone users aren’t rebooting multiple times daily due to running out of memory but that’s another story.
I recently decided the time was right for me to upgrade my phones. My plan was to upgrade the Storm to a HTC Droid Incredible which is reported to be a fantastic phone. I would get rid of the Nokia and replace it with a Blackberry Bold 9700 on AT&T. I haven’t had a contract on AT&T in years. I’ve been a loyal Nokia fanboy and bought my phones retail. Even my Storm, I bought on eBay because I was stuck in a contract with a crappy HTC Touch (worst “smartphone” ever). This time, I figured if I got both phones on one-year contracts, I wouldn’t find the contracts too onerous and it would be worth the subsidized pricing.
Imagine my shock when I went to AT&T’s web site yesterday and found out they had eliminated one-year contracts. They will now only sell two-year contracts. I’m still in shock over it. Why? Carriers, more than ever, are promoting smartphones as the way users should go. Smartphone buyers (or a large percentage of them), to my mind, are more affluent than non-smartphone purchasers, more interested in frequent technology upgrades and, in general, just the type of customers AT&T could convince to buy a new phone every year. Heck, AT&T and Apple release a new iPhone every year for that very reason – current owners will upgrade… So, how is forcing people to buy into two-year contracts good for customers? How does that encourage people to upgrade to new phones – which they will likely want to do given the pace at which smartphones are changing?
Seems to me AT&T is making a big mistake. Yes, they’re protecting their own interests – especially in the face of the iPhone reportedly launching on Verizon this summer. On the flip side, however, Verizon, their largest competitor, is still happy to sell me a one-year contract – and I’ll take them up on the offer. I won’t be getting rid of AT&T, but I’ll gladly do them the favor of buying my Blackberry at retail (or on eBay). They can protect their own interests by sacrificing mine if they’d like, but I don’t have to be a party to it. Thank goodness Verizon seems to be maintaining their senses. I guess there’s something to this carrier polyamory thing.
I have quite a number of things I could address today. I’m a wee bit upset that the HTC Nexus One (aka the Google Phone) won’t run on AT&T 3G. T-Mobile’s network is fast, it’s true, but it’s not ubiquitous. Plus, I like AT&T — when my calls aren’t dropping. But, that’s not why I’m writing today. Today, I’m writing about open source software.
Let’s be honest. I mean… We can all pretty much agree that the cell phone retail model sucks, right? I’ve already outlined how cell phone manufacturers set arbitrarily high prices for their cell phones so that carriers can hawk those phones at discounted (aka subsidized) prices. Of course, the carriers’ discounted prices usually represent, for smart-phones at least, a markup of close to 100%. That unsubsidized price we have to pay if we buy an unlocked phone often represents a markup of 100-200%. What other consumer-focused electronic devices can garner such a markup. Not many…
