For the last year or two, I've been using a Nokia 3650 cell phone. It's quite a nice unit - BlueTooth, a decent screen, Java, a few cool apps (including remote control of my PowerBook), a basic camera, international roaming via GSM - but it's getting a little long in the tooth. Recently it's taken to powering off spontaneously, which is a little tedious. So it's time to look for a new phone.
There are lots of really cool phones out there these days.
I'm sure I've missed some. But they all have one thing in common: none of them are available from my phone company. I'm with AT&T Wireless, now merged with Cingular, which makes it unquestionably the biggest GSM provider in the USA. And what do they have for phones? Crap. Or, rather, vanilla, with a few teasers like the Motorola V3 RAZR. I suppose I could switch to T-Mobile, just to get the Treo 650, but the odds are that next time I'm in the market it will be their turn to be behind. Do I really have to buy an unlocked phone? (I know: I'm cheap. But why not?) Don't the US providers want my business? Do they really think that Blackberry has sewn up the high end market? (It hasn't.) Or do they only care about the 12-25 year old market? (Dumb.)
What's wrong with the US market? Why are all the exciting wireless innovations happening in Japan and Europe? And how much would an unlocked O2 XDA IIs cost me....?
(I didn't bother to take the time to hyperlink all of those phones and companies. You know where to find them. One of my favorite sites for drooling over unattainable gadgetry is Mobile Phones UK. Please wipe the saliva off your keyboard afterwards.)
Posted by geoff2 at January 25, 2005 12:17 AMPart of the problem isn't all US networks, but AT&T's network, specifically.
The rest of the world uses 900, 1800, and 1900mhz for GSM service. Other US providers use 900 and one of the other two (1800, I think).
AT&T uses 850 and 1800 (or 1900, whatever the one is that other US carriers use).
Why does AT&T use 850? Because they owned the frequences for analog cell phone use, and have now repurposed them. Cheaper than buying more spectrum.
As a consequence, however, AT&T has stopped selling phones (I almost typed celling phones, oops) that don't operate on the 850mhz band. That includes most 'world phones,' which are tri-band phones.
That includes your 3650 --- I suspect you have quite a number of dead zones where AT&T actually has service. After they stopped selling the phones, they offered a lame exchange program that would have given you something without bluetooth and generally not as nice. There was a big outcry at the time, but I can't find any references to it now.
At any rate, since AT&T customers (and anal-retentive 'must have ALL bands' customers) are the only people who need phones on 850, the selection of available phones is somewhat less than it could be.
Not that any of the other carriers are much better, mind, but there's a concrete reason why AT&T is so awful.
I'm on T-Mobile, and their phone selection changes less slowly because they'll sell down their stock of various things before they'll sell new ones. I couldn't get my Nokia 6600 through them, even though it had been out in Europe for six months or so, because they had bought too many 3650s. So I spent more money and bought an unlocked phone from someone else.
I was a big Palm/Handspring user from '97 through 2003, but after I got burned with the Treo 300 (a truly lousy design, for reasons that I won't go into here given how long my 'quick response' has already become), and after they've started requiring third-party support for Macs, I've sworn them off.
Posted by: J. Lasser at January 25, 2005 01:25 AMHi Geoff -- Actually the GSM version of the Treo 650 is not available yet via T-Mobile, but supposedly will be via Cingular in the next few weeks. Right now, Sprint is the only carrier offering the 650, but of course they are not GSM.
T-Mobile seems generally behind to me, and furthermore tends to provide little incentive to existing customers with expired contracts to stay with them.
Posted by: John at January 25, 2005 01:28 AM