Passing of the torch: here are my iPhone 3G and me in the eyes of my retired HTC Touch, now reduced to life as a Chinese dictionary.
(Credit: Graham Webster)All year, I've been using an HTC Touch as my telephone. But now, having just moved back to the United States, I found it so hard to get a reasonable deal for service with this unlocked GSM smartphone that I decided there was little reason not to get an iPhone.
This was not an easy decision. I'm about to begin life as a graduate student, so money will be tight. I already had a pretty decent smartphone, which I'd bought in China because it was Windows Mobile and could run Pleco, the undisputed master of mobile Chinese-English dictionaries.
And I was nervous about the iPhone 3G, despite its superior aesthetics and preferable interface, having heard so much about performance problems. For a few reasons, I decided to go with iPhone anyway.
The primary reason is that AT&T and T-Mobile, the main GSM carriers in the United States, did not seem to want to give me a no-contract plan with a good data option. Both wanted a two-year contract just for opening the accounts, according to their Web sites. I had assumed one could just bring in a phone and go month to month.
The U.S. carriers seem to be using a tactic that Beijing-based tech industry consultant Mark Natkin said is the favored strategy of Chinese carriers to retain customers. Rather than lock the phones, which would be easily unlocked in Chinese electronics markets, providers are requiring contracts for decent services. Responding to my speculation on whether China Mobile iPhones will be unlocked, Natkin, who is managing director of Marbridge Consulting, explained:
Rather than locking phones, China's operators have been moving increasingly towards locking customers into a long-term contract that comes with a phone sourced by the operator. In San Francisco, a quick walk down Market Street from the AT&T Wireless store, you can get your mobile phone unlocked for $20 in about 10 minutes. So in China, where the labor is much cheaper, not many phones would stay locked unless the SIM card was fully embedded.
The fact that this tactic seemed to be in action in the U.S. made it only slightly more expensive for me to get an iPhone, so I went for it.
This could foretell a model for Apple to end its devotion to single carriers. If Apple were willing to let multiple mobile companies sell the iPhone and provide service for it in the United States, each company could sell them at a price like the $200 to $300 we see for the 3G and nail us with high-priced data plans. Especially if users wanted to use services like MobileMe's push e-mail feature (supposing it were to work), there could be specific, iPhone-only plans. Why can't this be done with multiple carriers?
This model wouldn't be new. The same phones have been available at multiple carriers for many years. They are sold at below-cost prices and the carriers make up for that with service contracts. What I want to know is:
• Why do we need to lock phones if we can lock users into contracts?
• If my phone is locked to your expensive service, why do you need to nail me with a contract?
Couldn't the industry get along with one or the other coercive tactic?
The key railway artery in Japan, the Shinkansen or "bullet train" line between Tokyo and Osaka, will introduce Wi-Fi by March 2009, Japan Railways announced.
These trains are already incredibly comfortable, primarily because they are clean and quiet, and they usually deliver you to a key central location in each city. Another perk is the on-platform food vendors who sell totally passable box lunches, sometimes including sushi, without much of a mark-up.
The main drawback to these trains is they're not cheap. And while the JR announcement (in Japanese) doesn't mention whether there will be a charge, I'm guessing they'd brag if it were free, and free Wi-Fi is pretty rare in Japan, at least compared to Chinese and U.S. cities, where coffee shops rarely have the infrastructure for paid connections.
The service is to offer up to 2 megabit connections, and will be built in cooperation with NTT, Japan's massive, partially government-owned telecom.
I can't wait to be in Japan and rich enough to tick off the minutes at high speeds online. Until then, riders will have to search for ambient signals at station stops to send and receive e-mails, something I've found works pretty well on downtown Tokyo JR trains, but can be much harder on the Shinkansen.
Via Ajiajin, and thanks Hose.
Unlocked, semi-legal iPhones have proliferated in China since Apple failed to make a deal with a Chinese carrier. Now that AT&T will offer an expensive solution for those wanting iPhones in the United States on different carriers, will the unlocked market be...unlocked?
For $699, the new 16GB iPhone 3G will be available to non-AT&T customers in the United States. As I've reported, China Mobile and Apple are now in talks that are more likely to bear fruit. This post is based on a few questions I really can't answer. Let's have them.
- Will truly unlocked iPhones still be available in China? I put a lot of faith in the efforts of crackers to defeat whatever Apple comes up with, but I would personally be wary of getting an unlocked iPhone that might not accept upgrades, mostly because iPhone software needs upgrades. For example, I've been baffled--while using friends' phones--by the apparent impossibility of sending a vCard from one address book to another person using iPhone's mail application.
- If the China Mobile-Apple deal goes through, is it possible that "legitimate" iPhones will be locked to China Mobile and useless in other countries? Would top-market Chinese users, who are used to switching SIM cards at will and picking up multiple SIMs at home and in other countries (as well as in Hong Kong), stand for this? I don't know the technology well enough to answer this one.
- Does Apple sell unlocked iPhones anywhere on Earth? If so, I want one.
- And since I'm not an expert in cell phone fees, but know AT&T has raised prices for iPhone 3G service plans (and presumably for the large cost in rolling out the 3G network), is it worth $400 to get out of its clutches over two years and take on a reasonable plan with another GSM carrier in the United States? If you divide $400 by 24 months, a person would only need to find a plan that is $17/month cheaper. That doesn't seem absurd, given the $70/month plus SMS cost of the starting AT&T plan.
- And here's one for U.S. users. If you could buy a phone for much cheaper that was unlocked, but had to be semi-legally or illegally brought from China, would that scare off people concerned about product quality?
I'm going to e-mail one or two experts to see if I can get these questions answered, but in the meantime, feel free to speak up.
After talks broke down earlier this year between Apple and China Mobile over the (non-pirated) introduction of the iPhone, Apple's concession to non-U.S. carriers that they don't need to share revenue has apparently restored progress with the world's largest carrier.
This comes as China's government reports mobile accounts are nearing the 600 million mark. China Mobile alone has more than 400 million accounts. These numbers don't mean there are that many people with cell phones, however. I and many others have multiple SIM cards. I use one for visiting friends, but others use second cards, which can be purchased for under 10 USD, to keep various types of calls separate.
China Mobile said Friday the main obstacle keeping iPhone out of the world's largest mobile phone market had been cleared now that Apple has dropped its revenue-sharing demands.
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs said this week he would like to see the device introduced in China later this year, and a senior China mobile executive confirmed the two companies were back in talks.
"We've broken through the biggest obstacle and we are negotiating at the working level," Gao Songge, deputy director of China Mobile's general department, told AFP.
Now if only the U.S. iPhone would allow choice of carrier...
China Mobile has opened a wireless service center and Internet cafe at an altitude of 17,000 feet at the Everest base camp, making it the world's highest such site, according to People's Daily Online.
According to reports, the Internet cafe is aiming to effectively protect the Olympic torch relay teams' communications needs at Mount Qomolangma in Tibet. China Mobile has built a business office and Internet cafe at an altitude of 5,200 meters at Mount Qomolangma base camp to provide mobile services and Internet services to government officials, mountain climbing members and journalists.
Maybe they'll add an oxygen bar for out-of-shape journalists with underdeveloped hemoglobin.
A trio of mobile companies including two global giants will collaborate to find more ways to profit from and develop mobile phone-based internet use, the Financial Times reported.
Vodafone, the biggest-earning mobile company, China Mobile, the company with the largest user base, and Softbank, the third-place Japanese carrier, form the coalition.
FT writes, "The collaboration underlines how mobile operators are keen to stop internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo dominating the provision of potentially lucrative services on the wireless internet."
Indeed, Google is working on ever more wireless applications. At WWW2008 in Beijing on Wednesday, Google's president for Greater China, Kai-Fu Lee, gave a speech on "cloud computing" -- the idea that data will be stored online and accessible from a variety of devices, following users from device to device rather than tying people to individual machines.
A catalyst for this kind of usage, he said, is the iPhone. "As the Apple iPhone hit the market our back end servers really noticed," Lee said. "Even though the iPhone's [market] share is not large, on a per-phone basis the web usage is about 15 times more than other web-capable phones."
Mobile carriers so far have not been noted for their excellence in designing mobile services. With giants like Google, Yahoo, and Baidu on the scene, the carriers will have their work cut out for them. Perhaps we should expect to see joint-development deals...
The inventor of the increasingly ubiquitous Pleco Chinese-English dictionary software for Palm and Windows Mobile devices said the company is "very seriously considering developing" an iPhone version.
In an interview in April's China International Business (not yet online), Michael Love tells of developing the 6-year-old product and how it's getting popular enough that many foreigners in China are buying PDAs or PDA phones just to use Pleco.
I, for one, would not have bought my Windows Mobile-running HTC Touch if not for this program, and untold dozens of my Beijing friends and acquaintances are carrying around Treos for the same reason. (Love said he switches between a Treo 680 and an HTC Touch, himself.)
Here's what Love had to say about the iPhone prospects:
We're not thrilled about Apple locking down distribution and charging developers a 30 percent commission to sell iPhone software, but we really like the platform and think it has enough potential to be worth the hefty fees.
The iPod Touch is actually more exciting to us, in some respects, than the iPhone, since it doesn't force you to change your cell phone carrier and can be found almost anywhere.
It's next to impossible to buy a cell phone-less Palm or Windows Mobile handheld in many parts of the world nowadays, but the iPod Touch is all over the place, so for those people who are willing to buy a handheld just to run Pleco, it would be a better option than they've had in quite a while.
China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou said he will "keep all options open" on the introduction of the iPhone in China, Paul Midler reports.
In January, a China Mobile executive announced that talks had broken off over Apple's desire for control. Now, Wang says talks have not "officially" begun.
China Mobile is the largest mobile provider in China, a market that is projected to reach $2.8 billion by 2010, and urban China is by no means a no-iPhone zone. Apple develops more advanced locking techniques at roughly the same rate unlocking techniques make their debut in electronics markets worldwide.
Street prices for imported and unlocked iPhones vary with the news about any official sales in China. After January's news of the breakdown in China Mobile talks, prices spiked. But I suspect the gray market will not die even if China Mobile and Apple make a deal.
Apple products, even though they are made in China (my MacBook was shipped direct from Suzhou, near Shanghai), tend to be more expensive here. I overheard a Chinese couple in the Bainaohui electronics market at Chaoyangmen yesterday getting ready to buy a MacBook Air for about $2,700 (compared with about $1,800 in the United States). In a less extreme example a few weeks ago, the Beijing price at an authorized dealer for my friend's new MacBook was about $300 higher than in the United States or even Hong Kong.
No doubt, if the higher prices continue to dominate, people will keep asking friends to pick up iPhones in the United States or elsewhere to be unlocked here.
The Reuters article that Midler links to reminds us that iPhone talks are under way with NTT DoCoMo in Japan. Maybe the trip for gray market phones won't be as far...
It's hardly surprising that China Mobile can figure out about where its subscribers are when the phone is on (or when the battery's in). This sort of technology is standard in developed mobile networks, and it's fueling a wave of business innovation and "locative technology."
So why was it so shocking to an AFP reporter when China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou told an audience at the World Economic Forum that "we know who you are, but also where you are"? Will at Imagethief has already made the alarmist journalism argument, so I'll leave that to him. (The AFP headline ran under the unnecessary headline, "China's mobile network: a big brother surveillance tool?")
What struck me was U.S. Rep. Ed Markey's (D-Mass.) surprised reaction. Markey said the news was "bone chilling" and told AFP, "I have my eyebrows arched so high they're hitting the ceiling."
I just doubt this really could have been shocking to Markey, who is perhaps the U.S. Congress' most prominent name on telecommunications policy. Along with liberal members of the FCC board, he's been a friend to the "net neutrality" movement, and he was received warmly last year in Memphis at Free Press' National Conference on Media Reform.
Anecdotally, I would say the assumption among people involved with media and politics in Beijing is that it is trivially easy for the government to tap cell phones and gather location data based on which tower your phone is in touch with. E-mail also is often assumed not to be secure. Markey must know the U.S. government can do this too, especially in light of the illegal wiretaps by the Bush administration. (The secret monitoring of U.S. citizens would actually have been legal if they had bothered to get their warrants rubber-stamped by a secret court, so don't think due process is a defense in the United States.)
If Markey was really shocked, he was ignorant. If he was faking it, he was taking part in China alarmism on an issue that is news to practically no one in China. This is not the place to discuss the merits and demerits of government surveillance, but no one is surprised that it's a fact. I wish U.S. politicians wouldn't be so willing to make such statements about China just to grab the spotlight when journalists are unnecessarily aroused.
China Mobile will start requiring prepaid phone customers to show ID when buying SIM (subscriber identity module) cards, the company's general manager announced.
The anonymity of phone service for Shenzhouxing (prepaid) customers, which ChinaTechNews says account for 70 percent of all users, made it important to hold on to your original SIM documentation in case you lose the phone. If you lose the SIM and its number, as far as I know, you can't get your number back.
This comes at a time when China Mobile will also begin allowing number portability among its services (but not with other carriers). As it stands, users wanting to switch from prepaid to a plan or vice versa have to buy new SIM cards and lose their phone number. New 150-prefix numbers are portable.
The ID requirement brings mobile service into line with an expanding "real name system" (实名制, also "identity verification") that ties individuals to their actions in the market and in communication. For non-Chinese used to providing ID numbers or credit card information for a variety of services, this may not seem like a big deal. But this removes a more or less anonymous form of communication that is not easily tracked by the government.
Indeed, the idea was pushed earlier by the Ministry of Security and State Council Information Office, according to Telecomasia.net. The real name system is not well-loved by online commentators. It's been considered for blogs, online games, and social-networking sites already. What it represents is a traceability of actions, and accountability for speech, since many people communicate in online gaming environments and through blogs and BBSs.
I'd hesitate to call these developments a true loss of liberty. The government can probably already find out who's using what phone most of the time if monitoring criminal activity. Like Lester on The Wire, they need only connect the dots in a network of communication. And like the people Lester chases on The Wire, people with something to hide will likely find workarounds. The phone ID requirement should make it easier for the government to monitor people, but I think it will also make it notably easier for regular customers to deal with services.
