Yummy or Crummy?

A good friend of mine works at SonyEricsson as a phone designer, and whenever I ask him about work he tells me about all the limitations that Cingular and other carriers place on the manufacturers because they fear a certain feature might allow a customer to accomplish something without going through the network and using the data bandwidth. Or he would complain about how the carreirs dictate where their logo gets placed on the phone, usually smack in the middle and top of the phone, more prominently than the manufacturer’s logo.

They have way too much power in North America because consumers here can’t imagine paying what the phones actually cost. So the manufacturers rely on the carriers to subsidize the cost of the phone, which cause you and me to get locked up with ridiculous contracts.

I wrote a little bit about that when the iPhone came out. Now there’s a story on NPR about the same subject: Mobile Malcontent from On the Media

Under a lot of carriers’ constructions today, Bluetooth is almost completely crippled. You can’t send music back and forth. It’s very hard to send photos from your phone to your, all, again, because there’s a fear of losing control and there’s a fear of crippling some potential business model that revolves around charging you to do something with your phone.

I wish more people would complain about this, so that we can cause things to be better. We need to start demanding better design for the phones, better features, better contracts, and better services from these guys.