I watched enviously as my Mom handled the new Moto Droid. It was fast, powerful, and awesome in ways I never thought possible. Taking a break from switching from the phone Mom was returning, the Verizon sales dude picked up the phone and demonstrated something that I thought was firmly stuck in the realm of iPhones: He tapped a button on the screen and spoke to the phone. Suddenly, even in the noisy store, Google sprang to life and found “Furniture Stores”, with little link entitled “Local Results for furniture stores” with a blue dot next to the name of the town we were in. I couldn’t help but let out a “Holy Sh–” in the middle of the crowded store. I got a few looks, but the din of the store kept them local. The Verizon dude chuckled and quietly admitted “Yeah, that’s what I said too.”
I had just bought an HTC Touch Pro six months prior for my new business, and wasn’t even remotely eligible for an upgrade. Mom was a die-hard blackberry user, her last phone being an 8830 world edition, but she hated the tiny buttons. She also hated dialing using the same tiny keyboard, which has the numbers placed awkwardly one column in from the edge of the phone. I have convinced her to give the phone I had a shot, an HTC Touch Pro running Windows Mobile 6.1. I loved the keyboard, and it was an excellent email and text messaging device, and had a nice touch screen. After a few minutes playing with the phone, she decided to get it with her upgrade. We had to ask at the store for one: they weren’t even on display. That should have been a sign. Two weeks later, we were returning her Touch Pro, and I was drooling over Droid.
I had turned a blind eye to the problems on the Touch Pro. It is not a bad piece of hardware. The keyboard is truly fantastic, with nice large keys, solid construction. The phone has excellent sound quality. The problem was Windows Mobile. Using the phone felt like dragging a grouchy kid to buy new clothes. The phone was always lagging behind, getting distracted, and refusing to try on the sweatshirt. I had largely ignored these problems. I rarely used the phone for phone calls. Most of my time was spent in the email application, and occasionally the web browser. My mom, on the other hand, used her phone constantly. Email was checked and sent all the time. She switched rapidly between sending e-mail and calling. Windows Mobile couldn’t keep up. To top it off, I started noticing the same problem with my phone. Every complaint from her rang true, and I started to hate my own phone. She could return hers, I was stuck with mine. We drove back to the same Verizon store we had been at the week before, got our sales guy, and gave him the bad news. Mom could not contain herself any longer: “I hate this phone. I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. I need to exchange it.”
We wandered the store, and the Moto Droid caught my eye once again. I had heard bad things about it: The keyboard felt cheap, It wasn’t that great, and it certainly was no iPhone. The last one was a bonus, in my opinion, and I figured it was worth a shot. We wandered over to try it out. Mom fell in love almost instantly. The phone had a keyboard she could use, on screen dialing, and she could read her contacts without her glasses. It worked with outlook web access so she could have her exchange email. It was perfect. I had to have one. Then, I laid eyes on Eris.
The Eris is HTC’s Android phone. It ran a different version of Android, but is getting an update to 2.1 in early 2010. I picked up the phone, and thought about my options. I did want a new line for my business. I sure as hell wanted an android phone. I was still uncertain. The phone had no hardware keyboard, and only had three physical buttons, one of which was under a trackball. I am a big fan of tactile response. I started messing with the keyboard. Every key press brought a little buzz from the phone, shaking it just enough to tell me I’d hit a key. Perfect. Of course, it was still $100 I didn’t want to spend. I was about to walk back when the Verizon dude saw me. “Hey, if she’s getting the Droid, if you need an upgrade or a new line, the Eris is free.”
So now I have a new personal number, separate from the number on my business cards, and I have my own piece of Android love. This phone is FANTASTIC. The one feature I would say that is missing is support for the turn-by-turn directions on Android 1.6 or higher. The Eris runs 1.5. The Moto Droid runs 2.0, so it already has this feature, and I am still a bit jealous of my mom’s phone. Verizon PR reps have been telling some high-end customers that there will be an update to 2.x sometime early next year, so that feature is pending. It also doesn’t support tethering through Verizon yet, but I found an application that gets the job done. I’m not going to bore you with the specs of the Eris or the Droid, suffice to say they are both powerful, fast, and awesome to use. Make sure you download the Barcode Scanner application by ZXing Team, and give this a scan:
QR Code URL
(iPhone users can also get NeoReader from the
app store for free to scan this kind of barcode.)
It’s always awesome to get a new piece of hardware that you like. I had an iPhone for 2 years, and had to baby it, which I hated because it was so damned fragile and that was just the start of the full suck iPhone experience. Overall the phone is actually pretty cool, sure the Droid does way more, but that’s not important to everyone. Between Apple and AT&T customers really got slapped in the face, myself included, if they had an issue. As cool as these new smart phones are, the real problem is cell phone companies. Look at how expensive monthly plans are especially for the iPhone, and many other comparable phones, just to have a data plan attached to your service. Smartphones should be the logical, normal, progression of the cell phone. There should be no extra charge to use them, or their features, it should just be included with the phone at no extra charge, and I don’t mean just quietly rolled into an overpriced plan in the background. Still, if you have to have a smart phone, and you don’t like getting slapped in the face by Crapple and AT&T, then the Droid is awesome. A phone should do everything that it is advertised to do when you buy it, since you bought it. I know cell phone companies say that they give you a deal on the phone when you get a plan, but I wonder if the cost of the phone is artificially jacked up to make it seem like a deal. I mean really, my first phone with a color screen in it and a camera was said to be worth $320 bucks. The funny thing is that a PS3 costs $300 bucks and I’m sure is way more complex than my non-touch screen, number pad only, sucks to text on phone. I’m still pissed that my first cell phone with a camera in it, had the USB transfer feature locked out by Verizon. Basically, I was supposed to pay an extra fee just to get my pictures off of the phone. Let me put it this way, I am not recommending that you use the phone for what you got it for if Verizon doesn’t want you to without an extra fee, but I will say that the phone in question had a Linux based OS. I guess as cool as this stuff is, I just wish the cell phone companies did business a little bit more honestly especially because they are over charging you to use the natural resource that you own as a citizen anyway. That’s right, we own the airwaves, bandwidth is owned by the public and used by companies for data plans, etc. The companies pay very little for this awesome service, but charge you an ass load for it as a “data plan.” They are making you pay for something you already own in a sense. Again, it would be nice if they were a little bit more honest, cool phones or not.
Android itself is a light in the dark cell phone world. It’s potential is basically limitless and I am in love with it too. Perhaps we will have to fight over it.
Verizon is actually moving away from the tactics of yesteryear. Devices are less and less locked down. They are planning on moving to a GSM-based 4G service, and have tried to create an open approval process so that anybody with some know how and some circuit boards can submit a device. Furthermore, they plan on allowing “Unlocked” devices on the network. Droid doesn’t seem to have any of the features locked down.
I would say that phone prices are higher than their base manufacturing costs, but low for the amount of technology crammed into a small package. My phone has a color touchscreen, accelerometers, a digital compass, a GPS, USB connectivity, a 500+mhz processor, an 8GB sd card, a 5 MP camera, a cellular chipset, an 802.11bg chipset, Bluetooth, a 1300mAh Lithium Ion battery, and an open source OS carefully ported to it (with a few add-ons by HTC). My phone would normally be $100 in store with a contract, or $300ish without. The Moto Droid has all of these things (including a larger screen), plus a slide out keyboard, and it costs $300 with a contract, had a $100 mail in rebate, and got me an Eris for free.
Both these phones came with artwork, both visual and auditory, and are warrantied against defect for a year. These devices took time and effort to develop and release to the market as well. I think the price for a smart phone is fair for what it does, and what it has. I think they likely eat at least $50 or $100 on each device to release it to the market. A free phone non-smartphone is still a complex, $50 to $100 machine to the store. It is $200 to the customer in most cases, probably because it still costs Verizon a few bucks to pay their employees to help you pick out and activate your phone. However, the devices are not where Verizon, A&T or Sprint makes their money.
The monthly plan is a different story. With a $30-$40/month plan on top of the regular voice plan, smartphones can almost double a monthly bill. Text messaging and tethering also cost more. The amount of data transferred on these networks in negligible compared to on standard internet connection, but is just as expensive. This may be partially because it is still less common to have internet on your cell phone than in your home, but we are well beyond where having internet on your phone is rare. Between our three cell phones, we probably pay $200/month for our plan, or roughly $2400 per year. This seems like a lot of money, but then you realize what you get for it: Nearly anywhere in the United States that is inhabited, we can talk on the phone for 11.6 hours a month during the day to any phone. Calling each other doesn’t subtract from this 11.6 hours, nor does calling anyone else with Verizon, or calling at night. We can also surf the internet, get maps, watch YouTube, send e-mails, update twitter, etc. etc. etc., all for no extra cost from that plan. Text messaging between us and other Verizon folks also is covered, with another 500 messages to anyone else in there too. That may not cost Verizon very much to provide, but for us it is still worth the money to have all those things.
As for the expense of your first phone with a color screen and camera: I too would be angry about the restrictions copying files from my phone. I complained to Verizon about the fact that my Blackberry 8830 had its GPS locked out. Verizon seems to have hear the people, and is now leaving features on new phones (at least in the smart phone category), unmolested. In addition, they are promising an update that will directly compete with a service they offer on Droid devices. Turn by Turn directions from Google Maps will likely kill VZNav, at least on Android devices. The Moto Droid already has it, and the Eris will have it in January or so. This is, in my opinion, quite a good thing for Verizon. They can focus more on expanding their network and making services better and cheaper.
I feel a company should give as much to a consumer for their money as possible. Verizon had strayed off this path for a time, locking out features and then charging to use them. Now they seem to have embraced openness, updating their Windows Mobile devices to remove the hobble on GPS, introducing Android based phones, all the while increasing service and coverage. I have been pleased with my service, and hope that this strategy of playing nice continues well into the new 4G era.
As always a well reasoned reply. I still think the monthly cost is BS for the aforementioned reasons. The cost of developing things is relevant, but when you look at the manufacturing process the development is expensive, but once they move to production in “East We Beat Our Children Stan-ina (pick a country without our quality of life, or freedoms, that we trade with anyway) their cost of manufacturing plummets. I am sure that we will never really get accurate numbers for the cost of these things when it comes to electronics. Even in developed countries the speed at which goods made from blueprints, CAD drawings, etc. can be manufactured by machines is amazing. Apple mostly uses multi-touch for the iPhone, granted they think it’s theirs now, and in some ways their version of it is impressive, but the overall technology used to develop it was performed at a University. Many large engine companies donate equipment to engineering departments at many schools, the catch is that they and the University own all of the research that comes out of those labs that’s done on those machines. Sounds like a way to save a lot of money developing to me, at least initially. The original technology in the electrocharger was developed and tested at Texas A&M. So again, we will never know exactly what the cost was by asking the manufacturer, even if they tell us we won’t all believe them, and a quick nickel is better than a slow dime. When the iPhone was released it was $600 for the 8 GB, then $500 one month later, then $300 3 months after that. Still this is Apple, and screwing their customers is second nature. Still they would have justified the initial price with the excuse of development although it must have been way better to sell as many as possible as quickly as possible before the iPhone killers hit the market. So I guess what I’m saying is all of your points are valid, but I think we have no way of being 100% sure who is more valid on that one point
. We do know from some other industries how much it costs to make some other things. A toy car make in China for Wal-Mart, one that’s about the size of an average adult male’s hand long and about 3 hands high, with paint, and flame detailing costs 18 cents to make in China with people working 7 days a week, living in dormitory style housing with poor living conditions. This same toy is sold to us usually at a rate of $15. Sure this is no where near as complex as a phone, or especially a smart phone, but it’s a relevant point. The standard retail markup is usually 45 or 50 percent, but this varies from store to store, and from good to good especially with electronics. The markup on car stereo products can be as much as 200 percent. A hot item, like these Zhu Zhu pets, are selling for way over the standard markup. Of course this is a simple function of supply and demand. The point I’m getting to here is that the numbers for how much this stuff should cost are tough to say. They always have been. I paid 30 bucks to get a used DVD of the last Ronin Warriors disc to complete my collection. Before it was discontinued it sold for 15, and after some of the used discs sold for as much as 100. So here was an item that was probably always wort about 50 cents that I paid way too much for because of the value to me. The point is that numbers like this are always tough to determine. The manufacturer will whine to you about how much it costs them to make such an awesome product regardless of whether it does or not, the consumer will place a value on the product based largely on their perception of how much they “need” the product, etc. etc. The point is that in most cases we know that the manufacturing costs of these things are way lower than they seem. Take Red Wing shoes for example. Red Wing shoes, well most of them, are made in Minnesota. They outlast almost every other shoe out there. The electrical contractor shoes I had lasted me 24 months, and are still presentable, and cost $120. Air Jordans used to sell for that or more and they’re crap Nike’s made in Nike sweat shop 13,000. Sure Red Wing does not get the same percentage as Nike, but they still make money, so the markup is really made by Nike on a greed basis and why not,, they’re not a charity. Anyway, I’m making lots of Apple to Oranges comparisons. All I’m saying is that we don’t really know how expensive the stuff is to make, and what a fair markup is. I know that in general electronics can do way more now than they could for the same price only 5 years ago, but they do seem to be way less durable. Sure they’re more complex, but our methods of fault detection are better now too, so my guess is that we can make durable stuff as humans, but we deliberately don’t. Whether it’s just laziness, etc. etc. I’m not sure….