Well, you'll be paying the ~$1000 "real" price back in overpriced contracts with obscene minimum runtimes. (unlocked versions are available for ~€700-€1000 in Germany, France, so the real price is probably closer to $600-800, as Europe routinely gets screwed over on import prices anyway)
I'll stick with my cheap-ish phone that is actually mine, and a nice and flexible pay-as-you-go tariff. The way mobile phone contracts are going these days (in Europe) you're almost guaranteed a bad deal with a contract.
$200 would probably make a customer out of me. I'm still considering jumping on the Spring SERO bandwagon, because $30/month would save enough money to buy stuff I want.
I thought about getting a smartphone with sprint for a subsidized price, but the phones are all totally lame. Nobody but apple figured out how to make a useful "smart" phone. The phone companies have gotten plain-jane phones down pretty well, but they never figured out how to scale up the features. Apple sorta went backwards. They scaled down a computer to make it a cell phone. (its not the best analogy)
I think i'll just get a sprint sero simple phone and save up some bucks and get a climbing rope.
Well I paid $400 and I don't regret it... I did unlock it as Canada has the worst cellphone market in the world. If the second gen is unlockable then 200$ is a bargain.
this is a move that might help a little against the android devices coming out...its a late move though as i think att should have been subsidizing the "carrier" locked phone anyway.
You don't buy any cable box and hook it up and have it magically work. You don't buy any computer and easily throw any OS on it (drivers, etc).
Specifically cell phone companies like to make money on the back end and offer up cheap cell phones to people willing to sign contracts. It is because most people would be willing to sign themselves into a crappy 3 year contract and pay 50$ for a phone rather than pay 500$ for the phone.
i think the whole lock thing is weired - cell phone should be available as any other consumer items at walmart, circuit city etc. You just go to these stores, pickup the phone and hook it up with any service provider of your choice, same as what we do with our TV, Internet etc.
That would be great! Are you willing to pay an extra $150-300 for your cell phone?
The problem is that it would cost more. In fact, you can already just buy a phone (unlocked) at many online places. The reason it isn't popular is because it costs significantly more - to the extent that even most geeks go with the cheap, locked stuff.
Now, would it make the monthly plans cheaper? Probably, but not by as much as the additional money you'd spend on the phone. Why? Adding a customer, even if they bring their own equipment, costs money. Billing needs to be set up, often it takes time from a rep, new customers have a ton more questions, etc.
So, if you'd be willing to pay an extra $50-100 (and convince 60% of other people that's a better way too), then the industry might change. Until then, we're stuck, but we have cheaper prices.
So I guess this argument would extend to other industries as well. You could buy a cheaper computer that was locked in to a particular ISP or a car that was locked into a particular fuel supply. Or perhaps a TV that only connected to a particular cable supplier. All these year of inefficiently allowing consumers to freely match their products and suppliers! What have we been thinking.
Now, would it make the monthly plans cheaper? Probably, but not by as much as the additional money you'd spend on the phone.
In the netherlands you can get a monthly plan for 50% of the original price if choose to go "sim-only" i.e. without a new phone. Depending on the amount of minutes you buy and the phone you'd want this can be significantly cheaper.
If they didn't add so much nickle and diming bullshit, I bet their customer service costs would go waaaayyy down. Most of the cell phone confusion from the large amount of confusing restrictions and nickle and diming.
Locked telephones have set a bad precedent and some broadband ISPs are attempting to do the same thing with routers. In the UK, Sky, part of NewsCorp, supplies a badged NetGear DG834G or suchlike with patched firmware. However, it isn't obvious how to change the settings - or change the account details to make it work with other ADSL ISPs. It doesn't have default NetGear username/password of admin/password and uses admin/sky instead. Thankfully, the GPL2 source is available. However, I'm very concerned that in the future ISPs could offer enhanced or exclusive access through routers which are not trivial lock down or patch and which would be incompatible with other ISPs.
Here in France we have a law that makes that happen. If you sell a product in France you can't be forced to by a service at the same time. It's one of the consumer protection laws, and for the cell phone people it means that all phones are available for direct purchase.
I'll stick with my cheap-ish phone that is actually mine, and a nice and flexible pay-as-you-go tariff. The way mobile phone contracts are going these days (in Europe) you're almost guaranteed a bad deal with a contract.