technology gone wrong

[waider]

Why complain so much about your phone? Do US providers really lock you to a single model? Here, in the less-enlightened lands (we use that nasty GSM stuff instead of CDMA), all that ties you to your provider is a little inch by half-inch card with a chip on it. If you want to put that into a five- or six-year old Ericsson GA628, you can go right ahead and do so.

Comments

[candice.livejournal.com]

YES.

It tends to cost an activation fee to change phones, too, and you generally cannot change them between services unless you buy the more expensive versions of the phones.

[waider.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's hugely sucky. Does it apply to GSM phones also?

[candice.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily. GSM ones you can switch, but the providers also try to lock you into a "cancel and you pay X" contract. Other problem is that GSM coverage is still spotty here. (They also seem to cost a fuckton every time I've gone phone-buying.)

I have had several cdma pieces of junk, you see.

(And analog bricks before that, -and- a briefcase sized "radio phone" that we used to have before the car phone craze started. :)

[rwx.livejournal.com]

We have (i think) the same SIM cards you do, and some providers have GSM service. However, the way that phones are vended are different than over there, and they try to make you think that you're locked in and can only get a new phone by upgrading through them.

I keep an older phone around so I don't have to bring my (expensive) Visor Treo into large deserts and stuff like that. I pop the card in and out with no problems.

Now, the 'features' that the phones come with aren't interchangeable, and that's the big selling point. I mean, why switch to a phone with a digital camera if your provider won't let you use it? (After you've gotten past the point of 'why switch to a phone with a digital camera?', I guess.)

also, there is a 'consumer revolt' against fancy, over-featured phones or some other stupid media-manufactured trend or other.

[rwx.livejournal.com]

(note that most of the points above apply to US GSM service, yatta yatta, still early local time.)

[waider.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Do you get charged for the features? The last phone upgrade I got was to get GPRS, for which I needed a SIM card upgrade, but that was free. So now I have GPRS and HSCD (basically, bundling phone channels to provide faster modem connections) and the only significant hit was for the GPRS phone itself.

[rwx.livejournal.com]

I don't think you get charged for the features -- at least, you don't on my provider (I flipped through their calling plan.) -- but they have to turn on the support for some services and they only turn on the services for the phone you have according to their records.

The only two excetions I can think of is that the 'sidekick' devices have different price plans based on their different features and that 'stereophonic' ring tones are more expensive than 'polyphonic,' but my phone doesn't do stuff like that -- being primarily a PDA, it restricts itself to sounding like a peevish r2d2.

--Corprew

[waider.livejournal.com]

Strangely, when my phone rings it sounds like... a ringing phone.

[rwx.livejournal.com]

do you have a Visor Treo?

[waider.livejournal.com]

Nope. Siemens S25. I've got a phone sled for my Palm Vx but the charger is a bit dubious so I've only used it once or twice. Still sounds like a phone, though.