Unlocked & Unsubsidized, The Future of Cell Phones
While I’m a big geek and a guy who loves coding many hours everyday, I’ve been spending a lot of time on this blog talking about business. I love business aspect of technology and it’s obvious there’s a lot going on and it’s sometime worthwhile to analyze things a bit.
Techcrunch has an interesting post on long-rumored (and hopefully soon to be released) official Google phone. The parallels to Apple are quite interesting. When Apple first came out with an “iTunes phone”, they went to Motorola to create it and it ended up being a mixed bag. Not a terrible product, but clearly not Apple’s vision. The next logical step was obvious and from that the iPhone was born.
When the iPhone was first released, Apple decided to try and change the way the industry worked by selling the phone unsubsidized. It worked pretty well, sales-wise, but obviously Apple released that selling a 600$ (or even 400$ phone limits the number of people who will buy your phone compared to a 99$ phone.
With its first in-house phone, Google is taking a similar route and going one (important) step further : according to Techcrunch they will sell the phone unlocked and will forgo the carrier. Buy the device, insert your sim card and you’re good to go. It’s something I was hoping Apple would do and it’s clear that AT&T in the US hasn’t been the best of partner for Apple. If Google does succeed with this plan, hopefully it’ll pave the way for Apple and others to follow suit.
It’s interesting to see the newcomers in the telecommunication industry change the way things work. The iPhone has done quite the revolution with regards to user interface and acceptance of the smart phone for the general public and hopefully Google will be able to make even more changes to get that industry to be a little bit more user friendly.