That would be immensely satisfying for me when I’m on the run! I’ll gladly sacrifice oodles of nice-to-not-have functions to get that.

If the iPhone has 4–8 GB of memory, Apple could offer really good camera functionality as well. :cool: It might be way down on my own priority list, but it would surely cause large numbers of consumers to pick them up like cupcakes. And I just might start shooting again.

May I also suggest a radically new all-in-one software: a total MobileBridge between your iPhone and Mac/PC. Firewire and BlueTooth. Lightning-fast synching, transfer of music and photos, selected documents and emails. And more...

Intelligent triband mobile phone, a business phone, PDA, iPod, camera all in one? The best GUI ever seen in a mobile phone? The trademark elegance of Apple industrial design? :)

Sold!

oops, yeah, verizon blows. I meant to type T-Mobile...and I guess my brain just puts them in the same boat. I'm not to informed about the different wireless carriers. My point is just that while the Apple OS is great, it's the combo of a usable OS and shiny white package that will make this product a success.

Apple doesn't have a history of putting their OS on generic hardware, so I wouldn't expect that. T-Mobile doesn't make phones. But the same companies that OEM the Apple hardware also make phones. It's a fairly small bridge to cross.

A T-Mobile alliance makes more sense than any other. They are international, and use a world-standard technology for mobile telephony (GSM). Cingular also uses this, but they are a US carrier only. Verizon, Sprint, and Alltel use CDMA, a closed architecture that doesn't travel well and always locks the phone to the specific carrier who sold it.

Why not offer iPhone on all carriers?
 

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Why couldn’t Apple make the iPhone available on all carriers: Cingular, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, Alltel – giving the customer absolute freedom of choice?

I don’t understand the US system. Why is an exclusive alliance with a carrier needed at all? I almost get the impression that mobile phones (cell phones) are sold in the US with more focus on the carrier than the producer? That can hardly serve the producer!

In Norway, when Samsung, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, Motorola or whoever offers a cell phone to the market, it is sold in the following way:

* The phone is offered on all carriers
* The same shop may offer various carriers
* The competition is in the degree of subsidy offered, i.e.: price
* Typically, a new phone is "locked" for 12–24 months
* You can also buy an unlocked phone, at an unsubsidised price

As mentioned, the strong focus on the carrier in the USA does seem to water down the cell phone procucers’ branding and marketing opportunities.
It seems to me that this does not serve Apple well.

So: Is it possible for Apple to offer the iPhone on all carriers?
Or is this simply "not done"? i.e. not the American way?

Best regards,
A puzzled European

The lock-in to carriers is purportedly to avoid confusion, i.e., you turn on the phone and it connects to the carrier you subscribe to. Where this is a real nightmare is when you are travelling. If I don't arrange for roaming rights at a destination, the strongest local will answer and ask for a credit card or phone card number before you can make any but a 911 call, and, of course, you can't receive one.

The local phone company here in Nova Scotia, for example, uses Sprint as its roaming partner. In the North Eastern United States, however, cell service is dominated by Verizon and Sprint cells can be hard to reach. On many occasions in New England and New York I've had colleagues chatting away on their Verizon phones (same brand and model as mine) while all I can get is an analog signal from Sprint. It would be fantastic to be able to push a couple of keys and switch using a calling card of some sort.

Not to mention when you’re travelling internationally. Wouldn’t it be great, when in France, to be able to switch to a local carrier – and have local calls be charged to your credit at local rates?

I’m sure it’s the same when you are visiting Europe. To receive calls from Norway to my cell phone on my California visit, was even more expensive than making those calls myself. And if I wished to dial a local number, to a business 10 miles away, it got routed twice across the Atlantic and charged correspondingly.

Unnecessary!

But profitable :D

As you know, the world standard for mobile phones is GSM. However, the US carriers went with other technologies for the most part, and GSM was an afterthought. VoiceStream, which later was bought by T-Mobile, was the GSM pioneer in the US. Everyone else went with CDMA except for Nextel which uses iDen (proprietary) and AT&T used TDMA (only one to use it). AT&T migrated to GSM and was bought by Cingular, which had its own mediocre deployment of GSM. Sprint bought Nextel and is absorbing them into the CDMA network, but will keep iDen running for a while.

None of the phones use a SIM card like you're used to (except iDen, but it's a proprietary card). This means it's not just as easy as dropping your card into a new phone. A CDMA phone's identity is built in, hard coded (the ESN). Your carrier has to activate your phone on its network.

And why won't they do that? Because each carrier bastardizes the phones to suit it. They remove key features (Verizon) to force you to pay its fees to do the same thing over the network, and add crap to try to sell you/charge you more.

This doesn't apply to the GSM carriers, which work like they do in Europe.

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What? No SIM cards?! Then what in the world do you do if your phone dies and you need to be up and running immediately?

Well, I suppose that sort of Stone Age approach to technology may explain why I drove from the west of Redding (California) to the coast, and south beyond Eureka for many hours with an "Emergency Calls Only" signal. I repeated searched networks with no success. And Eureka is a major town.

Shocking!

It is also worth mentioning that my phone was tri-band.

When I asked at a Cingular dealer, he looked at a coverage map and confirmed that my experience was not due to technical trouble. But he quickly put the map away when I asked if I could have a copy.

"Cingular – raising the bar."

Right...

You drive to the Sprint store, take a number, and wait about 1.5 hours. Then the tech takes your phone and tells you to either wait an hour or come back. When you come back you take a number and in about half an hour the tech hands you back the phone and says that they can't duplicate the problem, or that they don't have a replacement, or any one of the other excuses on their list, and tells you to call phone support to see if they want to do something different or ship you out a phone. Then your wife drives over to T-Mobile, while you're still on hold with Sprint customer service, and comes home with two nice new GSM-based phones, before you even get a human to answer at Sprint.

Not that I'd know from personal experience or anything.

I think it would be interesting if Apple offered it's own carrier. Kind of like .Mac. Or maybe a .Mac packaged deal, or something.

I take out my SIM card, put it into the phone of any friend who has the same carrier, punch in my access code – and I’m up and running.

That takes about 90-120 seconds.

But just to be clear Stones, that only works in Europe, I assume?

No. If I’m in the US with my wife, and my phone dies, inserting my SIM card would work just as well. Pretty darned sure.

The code and needed info is relayed to Norway and back again, giving me access just as if I was using my own phone. The only requirements are that it is 1) a tri-band phone that works in the US, and 2) that the phone is not locked to a different Norwegian carrier.

We use SIMs in Australia too. If your phone isn't network locked you can swap your SIMs to use different networks to take advantage of their cheap times.

Most SIM phones have a workaround as well. My friends phone died recently, so I gave him my old SIM phone and he got it to take his SIM even though it as a different network. Just took some work, that's all... Though honestly, I doubt you would want to do that every single time, if you planned on switching a lot...

There was a (very) brief blog post on engadget that was Dugg that said there would be some information about the 'iPhone' being released today...

Didn’t you hear?
The iPhone was released today!
BusinessWeek.cm has a major article on it.

Oh, I fully understand that, which is why we switched back to GSM. CDMA has the fastest data rates, but that's not worth much if you can't make a call and your carrier's support sucks.

There are four bands in GSM, with some being used only in some areas, and some phones only do some bands.
850MHz -- US
900MHz -- Asia/Europe
1800MHz -- Europe mostly
1900MHz -- US

There is an upcoming 2.5GHz band, but I don't think there's anything there yet.

Phones also may have a "SIM lock" so they only accept a SIM from the same carrier. However that can be forcibly removed from nearly any phone, and carriers will usually give you the unlock code if you are a customer in good standing.

Wow, that truly sucks Carlos!

Re: data speeds/bands, what is the status of 3G network deployment is the US now?