google? do no evil comes to mind?

wow first comment! a first for me! go go gizmodo!

As with all things, there are degrees of evil. @jdunns4 points to Google and their (in)famous motto, but that's just a motto and Google is certainly threatening to start moving onto the evil spectrum. Wireless companies on the other hand are just about the deepest evil on the corporate evil spectrum. They always forgo customer relationship building by shitting on their customers repeatedly with hidden charges, intentionally making their terms vague and completely impossible to understand and all the while being so hopelessly behind the global technology curve it's beyond embarrassing. But U.S. customers have no real choices to find a better deal because all of the carriers suck equally. It's as if they're competing to be the worst. Are there any better companies in the rest of the world? What do we have to do to bring them here??

@jdunns4: Please ban jdunns4, his comments are offensive.

I think many people would pay the true cost of the cell phone in order to have the flexibility to change carriers or service plans.

@BANDIT

Agreed. I'd rather be spend a little more on my phone than be locked into these egregious service plan. Besides, you're going to end up paying for it in the end either way.

Not me I like getting it from the man! go cheap phones..

if my phone breaks, I want to call the people who made the damn thing. Instead I have to call some hack in AT&T's CSR Death Star and recite my life story so they have enough infoto pull up my account.
GO.TO.HELL.TELECOMS

Locked phones are the most evil part of telecoms. Do you really think you're saving money buying subsidized phones? That the carriers actually came up with a system that saves you money?

Not only does it stifle competition, make the handset manufacturer completely beholden to the carriers, and prevent you from buying phones directly from the manufacturer, but it costs people more, on average, than if they bought the phones outright and didn't have a hardware subsidy incorporated into their monthly fee.

@HDC: I dunno about that... EA is a pretty damn evil corporation. Same for all those companies that keep lying about crap to cover [some executive]'s ass because they did something stupid, like insider trading or something.

But EA is definitely batting in the same league as the likes of AT&T

I could list other companies that come to mind, but they could incite controversy and fighting in gizmodo comments, and we'd never want that to happen, would we?

I disagree with the disagreement. There is a big diffrence between locked and subsidized. If I sign my soul away for a contract with a ~$300 termination fee there should be at least $300 off ANY UNLOCKED phone that is compatible with the chosen network. If I find a better carrier I should be able to pay the termination fee and WALK AWAY. I should not have to beg, borrow, and or steal to unlock my legally purchased phone to use it on another network or in another country.

a correction to the disagreement, ther is a BIG diffrence between subsidized and locked. I am in favor of subsidizing, but a purchased phone should not be locked esp. if I am signing my soul away for a ~$300 termination fee.

Here is my story about Evil Sprint: I got a text from EnMob.com about joining their movie gossip service. I ignored the message, then the next day I got a message thanking me for subscribing. I ignored the message thinking it was a scam and that if I texted them to stop then I would be charged. I got a txt every day. A month went by and my parents got the phone bill, it was twice as big as it should be. I told them about the txts. I then did some research and found out that they had scammed a lot of people and that I was right about them charging if you texted stop to their #. My dad got on the phone to Sprint and got me unsubscribed from their service, and he got the customer support person to refund the $70 dollars charged to our account. After two months of waiting for the refund my dad called Sprint and was told that they would not refund the money and that the agent was out of line for telling my dad that we would get a refund. Fu(k you Sprint! There is no way of protecting yourself from these scammers without the Governments help. Speak up and call the better business bureau/senators/ congress members or these scammers will keep on stealing our money

I hate how they brand the phones' firmware! And the stickers!
The Humanity!

Sprint is doing SO well that they let a bunch of customers go, so I don't want to hear any bitching from them.

if your "cell" carrier gives you a phone like that one pictured... i think you might be getting scammed.

especially if they say you need a small "personal cell tower" for your house and you have to stay within 50' of it.

Hey, no complaining about telcos. I used to be weighed down every day with excess change that filled my pockets. But, thanks to telcos, I've been nickled and dimed so that the nasty money is all gone.

Thanks Spriveritmobicin

@omg-ponies: You have been ON lately! LOL

Keep this up and I think we've got another candidate for commenter's HOF if anyone cares what I think! :D

My AT&T-locked SE W810i is a sweet phone, but it has one huge design "flaw" (for me, it's a flaw). You see, the buttons connected to connect-and-pay services are large, raised higher than the other keys around them, and placed right next to the primary navigation keys. So you think you're initiating a phone call and suddenly you're paying per kilobyte to connect to the web.

Now Sony is nice about this and provides software to remap the key to anything you want. Except AT&T removes those keys from consideration. I don't need internet from my phone, so NOT having internet costs me roughly $5 per month where having it costs me $20 per month. That's right--the phone is set up to encourage accidental connection fees. To keep my charges low I have to religiously keep the phone locked (but the unlock combination can lead to an accidental press of a "pay" key.)

This is one of those Walkman phones. Sony lets the phone play any loaded MP3 as a ring tone. AT&T disables this in favor of a pay-before-you-hear online site.

As soon as I can unlock this beast from AT&T the better. I'll never buy a locked phone again. They are *more* expensive.

@Macgyver:

You've got it right; I've never understood this argument:

While the freedom to use your phone with any carrier is nice to have, the average price of cellphones would also be much higher because they would no longer be subsidized by carriers.

If anyone is saving/making money in this arrangement, it's the carrier, not the consumer. For people like me, I don't care to have the latest phones and I don't upgrade my phone every 6 months (or even every 2 years). My phone is subsidized by my initial contract yet I am stuck paying the same monthly rate after my contract period expires.

I'd rather have more expensive phones (no subsidizing) and lower monthly rates since I intend to keep my phones longer than the contract term.

alot of his points ring true, but a couple are crap:

1. Chad and the guys representing other carriers are awesome. There can be no debate about this.

2. He complains about Cingular charging extra for morons to keep using TDMA. That was fair. it was a moron tax, and it was screwing everyone else who doesn't use TDMA.

I call bullshit on the increased cost idea. Sure, the average *up front* cost may be higher than the $0-50 people pay now, but the *total* cost of ownership will be much lower for two reasons:

- Consumers won't be locked into contracts for 3-5 years that are more expensive than what they need.
- Carrier transparency means phones can be better mass marketted, and so costs will ultimately *drop*, not increase, due to competition and supply.

Not to mention all the tangible competition benefits regarding service and plans that would result. There's basically no way to defend network lock-in unless you're a shill for a phone company.

For years AT&T has offered replacement handsets at an unsubsidized price with no contract extension required. Still the numbers of customers who choose to pay for an unsubsidized replacement handset is extremely low (certainly less than 1%). A very basic unsubsidized handset sells for about $200.
Also many arguments for the failure of MVNOs in the US is the absence of a handset subsidy.
This is a pretty mature financial and marketing model and is ready for some disruption, but who is going to challenge it? Look at just one example, advertising. Without a subsidy you could say goodbye to sub $100 handsets.

This idea that we need locked and subsidized phone to avoid paying through the nose is absurd. If mobile phones worked the way landline handsets do, you'd got to Best Buy or Target or Amazon and pick out a model you liked, hook it up through your carrier, and you'd be good to go. Handset makers would compete on features and price, and costs would go down. You might pay more up front than you do now for a subsidized handset, but over time even that might not be the case, if Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, et al were really competing with each other and retails were competing at the point of sale. As it is now, you kind of have competition at the manufacturer level, but it's distorted by exclusive contracts with carriers that only exist due to locked handsets. You don't have competition at the retail level at all.

The market is also distorted because there are limited buyers. Handset makers don't sell to the public on a large scale, so there are only half a dozen buyers (essentially a oligopsony market). Those buyers have a vested interest in maintaining the current system, because they more than make back any increased hardware costs through increased service revenue.

"While the freedom to use your phone with any carrier is nice to have, the average price of cellphones would also be much higher because they would no longer be subsidized by carriers."

Durr, yeah, but then the contracts would cost less per month. There's no reason to assume that you're saving money overall with the ridiculous bundling and contract tie-in schemes these companies push.

Up against the wall JDUNNS4 @SchruteBuck:

I disagree entirely that phones would cost more without exclusivity. Without exclusivity there would be drastically more competition in the mobile phone hardware market, driving prices down and features up. Besides, the lack of exclusivity will NOT prevent the carriers from giving us discounts, as they can still lock us into contracts.

I agree that locked phones is completely asinine and NO, it will not drive prices through the roof. Why is it so successful in other countries? Why can they do it and we can't? Why did the Industrial Revolution come to Europe decades before the U.S.? Why! WHY!

I totally disagree with the price going up with unlocked phones too. Just look at the digital camera market, you can get into a waterproof /shockproof 7+ megapixel camera for less than $350 and i'm supposed to believe that i'm getting a "deal" by buying a subsidized phone for $300-$399. xcough-bullshit-coughx. When they start making phones I can go swimming with, fall out of my pocket when jogging and get kicked 10 feet and it still work flawlessly, then I might buy their subsidy bull.

The only thing I agree with is the phone crippling.

thats a little bit liek what Intel was doing when AMD was bankrupt.
If AMD wouldn't have come back there is a 80% chance that we'd be using Pentium 6 processors, and be paying a whole lot more for our processors because of the fact that no other company is as big as Intel and no company today is as big as AMD (which isnt really that big considering the size of intel)
There have been multi-core, multi-processor configurations for a while in other parts of the world. The thing is that these are super expensive, and it takes 10 times as long to make compared to the rate intel makes their processors.

ALSO WiMax doesnt deliver DSL speeds like some versions of 3G and Ev-Do. It delivres CABLE speeds to your phone. Now sprint and verizon have been pushing television on your phone for a while so has at&t (formerly cingular).
This will open up the possiblity of getting HDTV on your phone. That'll be a hefty phone bill but imagine being able to use bluetooth to connect to your 60" HDTV 1080p to watch the super bowl and not recieve any latency because of the fact that Sprint and Verizon are super reliable. Tell me thats not amazing.
It'll be possible with WiMax they're not looking @ o wow i can see all my e-mails and download a PDF file in 1 second while @ home i takes me 5 minutes. OR hey look i can hear your myspace page song on my phone, bet your phone cat do that. They're looking @ look i just uploaded a 10 minute video to youtube in a mere minute. Or hey look im watching Live TV while driving to school cuz i sync'd my phone to my car. Or like my other example lets watch the super bowl, friend says i didnt order it in HDTV or i dont have HDTV whats the point, then the proud sprint user pulls out his new phone and says we can watch it on my phone just turn on you TV's bluetooth.
problem resolved. i should work in advertising.