Who Knows Best? You? The Handset Manufacturer? Or The Network
by Ewan Spence
What do you do when you spend a huge chunk of development time and effort to put a mapping service onto your phone, and then find it’s been replaced by a completely different (subscription) service by the mobile network? I guess that’s the question to ask Research in Motion, as their Blackberry Mapping service was replaced by AT&T’s $10 a month mapping service.
When Nokia packaged up the E61 messaging smartphone to the US, it received a bump in the model number (to the E62) and lost all its Wi-Fi capability. Why? Well, AT&T took the view that they “will permit only those built-in features it thinks subscribers want.†And of course every subscriber wants to pay them for internet access, and not sneakily use a home router, or a Starbucks hotspot, to avoid the data charges.
What annoys me most about statements such as this is the sheer gall that the networks have. I’d be much more comfortable with a network that just came right out and said “we’re not letting you have Wi-Fi on this device because we want you to pay us for internet access.†I’d be much more inclined to sign up with an honest company than one which tries to hide behind Orwellian double-speak.
As our smartphones become more and more important, the role of the networks becomes even more critical. As the recent Blackberry outage shows, it is, in practical terms, a single (critical) point of failure. The addition of Wi-Fi into smartphones is a perfect ‘backup’ so you can still be active with just your mobile, but that’s not what you as a customer wants. Is it.
Of course you could just buy the unlocked version of the phones, and pay upwards of $500, buy a SIM card and get your access that way, but the stranglehold (especially in the US) of handset purchase makes that very much an unknown – and don’t even think about asking for support. The networks are trying to define themselves in the 21st century as more than data pipes – if their attitudes continue, then expect more and more companies and individuals to ensure ways to bypass them simply because mobile messaging is vital to them. No matter how it arrives at the handset, as long as it arrives, will be the motto.
