For historic reasons. Sprint-Nextel/PCS and Verizon Wireless'/CDMA are hopping alongside the GSM stack. AT&T/Cingular "just" a few years back shut off CDPD. I'm not sure if they keep TDMA alive on some level. This means consumers are conditioned to buy a phone that pretty much only works on a single carrier. It's pretty mind boggling. Common sense dictates that consumer would want the opposite of exclusivity, yet, every marketing campaign stresses "phone XYZ exclusive on ZYX" and consumers buy the logic, hook and sinker.
As far as GSM-locks-need-to-go-away goes... this sure has been discussed a multiplicity of our rants about Android (;->). If there's anything the carriers are battling most it's informed consumers' vision of "demoting" them to commodity status and being a "dumb pipe". 4G is showing early signs that carriers (Spring/Clearwire) might be willing to go the BYOD commodity route but we'll see how that's going to play out. On Apr 28, 5:08 am, Dave White <[email protected]> wrote: > Apologies for the abrupt ending to my mail - I was typing on a train on my > phone and someone bumped me causing my finger to brush against the send > key... > What I was trying to say was that I believe the notion of carrier lock-in is > something fairly unique to America. Please correct me I'm wrong here, but > this is how I see it: For some reason the major phone manufacturers tailor > their handsets to suit the American carriers. This is despite a higher rate > of penetration of phones in other markets, and a greater uptake of > technology in those places. Think iMode for example. > > Can anyone explain why? > > -- Dave White --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
