Smart Phone
A few weeks ago I bought a new smart cell phone.
I got my first smart phone 7 or 8 years ago. At the time I was living in Europe, and I had a series of smart cell phones which would get your email, surf the web, listen to mp3s, watch videos, do blue tooth, and take/modify/view pictures. They had touch screens, qwerty keyboards, and even opened, modified, and saved word, excel, and pdf files. These phones had good calendars, worked as speaker phones, had alarms and timers, and would synchronize with one's computer. If you were near a wifi hot spot you could use the wifi service to connect to the internet. There were plenty of apps available, even way back then.
Since then I guess I have owned six new cell phones. No make that at least eight. The only significant improvements I have seen over this seven years have been the addition of a built in movie camera in addition to the still camera, and building in a GPS receiver.
My latest smart cell phone is made by Nokia. It is slightly thinner and also has a video camera facing you, so that you can do two way video phoning. It will do most of what the old ones would do (although not everything), but its main advantages are that it has a built in GPS and on board street maps already loaded for all of America. It has an 8gb card, about half of which is the maps, etc. It will behave like a stand alone walking or automobile GPS giving voice guidance (without expensively using GPSa or interacting with your cell phone provider). It also is able to take one's GPS position and elevation data and encode it to one's pictures in the hidden EXIF picture data. The picture can thus automatically be placed on a world map in flickr. That is nice; really nice. But other than that it is almost the same as what I already have. In fact I still use one of those eight year old phones as a backup. Still works great.
The Apple iphone has a very low capacity battery which the user cannot change; nor can he unlock the machine and put in a different SIM card. The new Google phone will do most of the things my Nokia will, but not all. The Google phone seems fine to me, but far overpriced. And it isn't really designed for the AT&T system, only T-Mobile. The Google phone is only sold by their own company store. There are words which describe what both of these companies are doing: Greed and Monopoly.
There are indeed some natural monopolies like the sewer and water companies, but this concept doesn't apply to cell phones. The big problem with monopolies like this is that it screws over the consumer. Over time the supplier gets arrogant and rude, and customer service declines. Not to mention that the price paid for the hardware is often way out of line.
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This link is about the new Nokia smart phone LINK: http://store.nokia.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/productdetail_10500_10101_-1_10000537?cid=dev-fw-src-na-acq-nokia5800-goog-us-na-303
The BBC had a article this morning (next day) describing how many Google customers are already angry due to poor customer service and the problems caused by only having one greedy, monopolistic, company-owned store which sells the phone. LINK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8451473.stm
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