Re: Verizon Phones!!!!

On 2007-08-07, Carl <crothman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
George wrote:
Pegleg wrote:
I realize this is a rhetorical question but....why does Verizon have
such crappy phones??????????????????????????????????

Mine seem to make and receive calls OK. What problem are you having?
[...]
You can see the same thing happening right now. T-Mobile, for example, has
the unique, compact, consumer-friendly Blackberry Pearl. The best Verizon
could do was come up with the much more business oriented Blackberry 8830.
T-Mobile got the iPhone. Verizon didn't. I believe there are other examples.

So, yes, from a purely practical viewpoint, VZ's phones work. But some of us
are into the latest technology, and/or the latest craze. For us, VZ
consistently disappoints.

All of this makes perfect sense. Mobile phone manufacturers build for
a global market in which the US is, if anything, a shrinking fraction
due to things like European currency strength and the size and growth
rate of Asian countries. On a world-wide basis GSM/UMTS handsets
outsell CDMA2000 handsets by a huge margin, so a lot of manufacturers'
R&D is spent serving the bigger market first. Worse, while you can
often sell a single GSM hardware platform worldwide, providing localization
support in software only, CDMA2000 hardware often needs to be specialized
to the North American market (for example, Asian CDMA phones often
support different frequency bands than the US, and almost always have
SIM cards; they need to change this to sell in North America). Since
GSM/UMTS phones don't need to be bought from an operator, a really
innovative model can sell itself even if operators don't initially
pick it up; with Verizon you can only use the phones Verizon thinks
are a good idea, or can sell at a good margin. The fact that there's
essentially a single source for the basic technology used by CDMA
phones (and that single source is having patent problems in the US
at that) doesn't help either.

Essentially, selling CDMA phones through Verizon is a niche market. The
vendors that play it in may make money, but are better off directing
their best R&D efforts at the bigger market with a potentially bigger
payoff. It is kind of too bad since CDMA2000 really does seem to me to
be better technology (as can maybe be seen in the number of niches it
is found in worldwide despite the dominance of GSM). There just isn't
enough of it to keep it at the leading edge of handset technology.

Dennis Ferguson
.

Relevant Pages

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