Wednesday, September 26, 2012

If carriers controlled the iPhone

Remember when carriers used to dictate to the manufacturers what every phone would be like? Since everyone’s currently complaining about flaws in the iPhone 5, I thought it would be an interesting thought experiment to envision things like we were still in the bad old days.

  • Siri would be an extra monthly charge, plus a fee for every time you ask a question. It would cost more than 411, not because it costs more to provide, but because it’s more convenient for you.
  • You would need to buy separate access to every individual city you wanted to use Maps in. And you think the quality of Maps is bad now?
  • Getting transit directions would be more expensive than the actual fare for the transit.
  • Developers would have to justify their business models before being allowed into the App Store, and pay way more than 30%. Few would bother.
  • You would never receive software updates.1
  • Unlimited what now?2
  • You would have to route your email through a special third-party service for no particular reason other than forcing you to pay an extra fee for the privilege of accessing it from your phone. (BlackBerry still does this!!!) iMessage? In your dreams!
  • The selection of available music, movies, and books (if any) would be limited to the lowest-common-denominator pop-culture tripe.
  • There would be no way to connect to a Wi-Fi network3 or anything other than your carrier, and no software controls to prevent your phone from ‘accidentally’ using huge amounts of cellular data when you don’t expect it, which, by complete coincidence, results in huge overage charges to you.
  • You would have to upgrade to a more expensive plan or pay extra fees to use the same bandwidth you already paid for, for things like Facetime over cellular or personal hotspot. Oh, wait…

  1. You think Android has it bad? This is literally the case for my Virgin Mobile MiFi. The manufacturer built a software update feature, and Virgin Mobile made them take it out. I might not care much if the thing wasn’t so infuriatingly buggy. ↩︎

  2. Actually, maybe this would be better than the current situation of widespread ‘unlimited’ scam plans that aren’t. (I don’t understand why this hasn’t been struck down yet as false advertising. I guess the FTC is toothless.)

  3. Another iPhone first. ↩︎