Hey, read this:
The greatest threat to mobile innovations like the iPhone isn’t consumer behaviour, cultural differences or reception to features, but epic and unregulated telco pricing. What’s needed is nothing less than a telecommunications revolution in which mobile developers and consumers join together to demand better data plans that are both competitive and realistic for these thoroughly mobile times.
…and that’s not just me talking, either. It’s Melanie at SmartMobs. Glad to start seeing high profile blogs giving this problem its due notice (I’ve been on about this here, here, and here, and as far back as I can remember…).
Having access to advanced Nokia smartphones for research purposes (thank you Nokia!) I can also sympathize with the reasons why the iPhone has not been a seducer of Japanese folk, either:
Japanese handset users are extremely into video and photos — and the iPhone has neither a video camera nor multimedia text messaging.
Yep. Agreed.
More to the point, though – to get over this divide, Apple (and other handset manufacturers) needs to take some respectable risk on and stand up to Canadian carriers just like it once stood up to the music industry oligarchy. Or, he threatens, we’re all going Android/Openmoko/Village Telco sometime in the next five years.
(…with nods to the fact that Apple’s music industry fight, over the “one price fits all” model for iTunes, has now been made obsolete in the light of the newest compromise to achieve a DRM free music store, acknowledging the greater good realized in freeing music…).