My column on fixing cellphones by killing the carriers
My latest Information Week column has just gone up: "The Solution To Mobile Phone Deadlock? Somebody Has To Die." The column discusses the way that mobile phone manufacturers, carriers and record companies all blame each other for the ways that mobile telephony sucks, and how we can solve the problem by tanking one or more of those industries.
The triumvirate of phone manufacturers, mobile carriers, and entertainment companies are the world's reigning champions at shifting blame and pointing fingers. Ask Apple why it won't let you use any song in your iTunes library as an iPhone ringtone and they'll tell you it's the fault of the greedy record companies.LinkThe music industry is supposedly so addicted to the vanishing ringtone market that they won't let Apple get away with letting you use the music you own in new ways without paying a ringtone tax (and some of them won't let you use your music this way at all).
Likewise, ask Apple why the iPhone comes locked and they'll tell you that AT&T (T) insisted on this as the only way that they'd offer Apple handsets. AT&T will tell you that locked handsets and vicious, one-sided term contracts are the only way to recoup the upfront cost of offering subsidized handsets to customers (what, they never heard of the installment plan?).
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Maybe it's because I'm in Safari but I get all of the ads but not the article. Talk about disappointing.
It does the same thing in Firefox on my work PC. It does seem to work in IE. Blech.
I thought the iPhone was NOT sponsored by AT&T and that you pay full price to Apple?
I understand that AT&T doesn't want the iPhone to work on the competitors networks, because that would break their exclusive deal with Apple. I'm curious what will happen on the European market where there are many more competitors (using the same GSM technology) and competition is fiercer. I suspect the incentive to unlock the iPhone (or keeping it unlocked as I'm sure Apple will break the current unlocking with a firmware update) in Europe will be greater. We'll see.
BTW Safari user and I don't see any ads, just the content. Just use the right plug-ins...
Speaking as someone in the mobile phone software biz -- bravo!
The most annoying thing about the three-way standoffs that you mention -- that keep replicating themselves, fractal-like, at finer and finer and lower and lower levels until you see echoes of them showing up in JSR specifications, media file formats, and the like -- is that these groups all have thinly-veiled contempt for one another.
The carriers believe that the handset guys are out to screw them -- any large-enough carrier starts to demand handset customizations for its own private random standards, see eg Vodafone selling basically stock Sony-Ericsson phones but with a slightly different set of root certificates for reasons lost to the mists of time. Cross-carrier handsets undermine these {Pick one: crucial well-intentioned bits of standardization / ridiculous attempts by carriers to control user experience}.
The handset guys of course hate the media companies -- both the media companies proper for the ridiculous ringtone racket, and the media patent holding companies that make you pay for a dozen licenses to implement mandated GSM standards. A half-dozen lines of code to downsample audio of the wrong format and your handset is patently criminal; run it on the wrong audio stream and you're in contributory-copyright-hell too. For a fun time some dull night, look at the differences between the MPEG-4 standard and the 3GPP video standard. The differences are trivial, obnoxious, and every one of them an intellectual property bonanza for someone.
The media companies, as always, wonder why technology is so insistent on moving forward. These phones should just be TVs duct-taped to the back of rotary phones, in their view. Probably with a coin slot on the back. The handset manufacturers' insistence on supporting MP3 was a huge war, which is why phone mp3 audio support only became ubiquitous a couple of years ago. Losing that battle has pissed them off no end. And they're still smarting from so many phones using SD cards without using the goofy "secure" fake-DRM features.
So these three guys who are propping each other up in reality are trying to screw each other -- hard -- behind the scenes. But they'll never break faith openly and start shooting: Each afraid that if he shoots first, the second bullet will be for him.
Ridiculous. In other companies, you can use your own music as ringtones, so ridiculous that Apple is using this as an excuse.
I couldn't care about this iPhone, I'm getting more and more disgusted with Apple. Oh yea, and all the whole bunch of them: networks etc. I think people are just a bunch of sheep.
Thank goodness it costs just 6 euros (8 dollars?) to unblock phones here in Spain, none of this nonsense.
Paul/Andre (@1, @2): Sorry about that --I think the article probably hadn't actually been published when you clicked (my editor told me it'd be live at 8AM EDT so I scheduled the post to go up a few minutes later, but the article may not have actually made it up in the first few minutes). Should be OK
I find it hard to fault the device manufacturers since unlocked GSM phones tend to be some completely awesome and unrestricted in functionality. They only become gimped when sold by a carrier with subsidy. This, of course, is the way to protest against the system: to buy unlocked, full-featured phones... but ultimately we appear to be either too cheap or too lazy to make much of a stand against oppression.
A minor correction regarding Chinese place names, on page two of your article, Shenzen and Guanjhou should be Shenzhen and Guangzhou.
Confirmed! Everything now looks "essentially" fine.
On a side note, someone on Destructoid had a nice rant about the mobile phone video game industry, which is huge in Japan (as evidenced by last week's TGS) but barely existent here. He asked what would it take to bridge that gap, and I think resolving this standoff would go a long way toward that end.
'Phone manufacturers: this is pretty straightforward. With the exception of the iPhone, your average mobile phone has a user-interface that combines the charm of a DOS prompt with the consistency of a MySpace page'
I disagree with this point; user interfaces are in the eye of the beholder, and WM6 offers far more configuration options than does the iPhone. Not denying that the iPhone interface is slick, but it's not much competition for the more highly customizable consumer phones, let alone phones geared towards business. It may be a win for now, but rest assured the big gun manufacturers will fight, and fight hard - no complaints there, as the consumer will win in the short term.
Cell phones blow, and it's all because of this industry of racketeering. That's one of the reasons I don't have a cell phone -- that, and I don't want to be one of those obnoxious people who talks on a cell phone incessantly.
Here's what I think would fix the industry:
1. Have an open standard communication protocol for one or all types of data transfer (voice, SMS, data, etc.) and require that all carriers use only these standards. Of course, technological improvements would be inevitable, at which point the standards can be changed, but it should be available to any carrier or manufacturer. This way, you can use any phone on any carrier, no ifs, ands or buts about it.
2. The manufacturers need to grow a spine and tell the content and carrier industries to shove it. Make devices that customers will actually want to buy and the carriers will have no choice but to support them. Give me a cell phone with an MP3 player without wasting engineering time and effort to restrict me from playing them as ringtones, don't charge me a fortune and firstborn for the dang thing, and encourage hacking it. Imagine the cool ecosystem of cell phones we would have if open source geeks could freely get the specs and build whatever OS/firmware the wanted to go on the cell phone!
3. Require that carriers be ONLY carriers. You can't be a carrier and a manufacturer and a content provider. You can only be one of the three and you cannot make deals with any of the others in order to lock a phone to a network, provide exclusive content, etc.
Apple is full of crap. You have every right to make ringtones from songs you own. It drives me crazy the BS that get's perpetuated by these guys.
Anyways, at least services like the ToneBee online ringtone maker makes it easy for us to exercise this right.