Google's biggest announcement was not a phone, but a URL | Hacker News Reader

Google's biggest announcement was not a phone, but a URL

arstechnica.com

132 pointsdfreidin43 comments

Hasn't Europe and many parts of Asia been like this for years? World's first = US' first?

Add Australia in there as well. Most phones, including the iPhone, are available here unlocked and can be used on any carrier

Technically true, but almost all phones are acquired via subsidies anyway. If you BYO device you get no real cost reduction unless you want a very high end device on a very low end plan or some other end case.

The only segment where BYO phone is strong is in prepaid. You do actually save money by not being on a plan but this isn't the option most people go for. People don't see it as the "grown-up" option.

Not many people do you think buy an iphone from Apple for $1040(http://store.apple.com/au/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iph...). They get it from Optus or something for $10 p/m or free. http://personal.optus.com.au/web/ocaportal.portal?_nfpb=true...

> Technically true, but almost all phones are acquired via subsidies anyway.

Again, yes, in the US. In some Asian countries, you can walk into any mall and there will be any number of stores selling new or used cellphones all of which are unlocked.

> People don't see it as the "grown up" option.

Again, this is limited to particular cultures. In some countries, prepaid is the norm, not the exception. People keep their numbers and switch phones as they move from one phone to the next, and buy only as much load as they need. (USD 0.20 good for 10 SMS messages)

I was referring to Australia (in response to the grandparent).

In Sweden there is a law stating that numbers have to be portable across carriers, no need to use pre-paid to achieve that.

That's also true in the US

It's not really new in the US either. You can buy most phones unsubsidized. iPhone 3GS is $599 from AT&T with no service commitment for example. Same problem with incompatible 3G frequencies though. The big problem is US carriers charge you basically the same amount if you take the subsidy or not. The only flexibility you gain is no service contract but due to competing wireless standards and frequencies you're still very limited in carrier choice. Google is using the same business model as everyone else.

You can get prepaid if you don't have a service contract. It of course depends on your usage pattern whether it ends up being cheaper, but it's very common in Sweden.

You can get a 3GS without a service contract from AT&T but won't the phone still be locked?

Yeah probably but more importantly you're functionally locked into AT&T if you want 3G and anyone spending $600 on a phone presumably wants 3G service. So you're stuck with AT&T or stuck with T-Mobile if you get an "unlocked" Nexsus One.

Indeed. In India, most phones are available unlocked. Also: (1) SMS and voice calls are dirt cheap on most networks, (2) there are no arbitrary vendor lock-ins, (3) voice quality on most networks is very, very good and (4) there are many, many mobile carriers to choose from.

We still need number portability and affordable mobile Internet, though. Ah well.

EDIT: s/India/New Delhi. I'm not sure about the state of mobile networks in other parts of the country.

It's the same all over India. /Bangalorean.

Europe is a collection of countries, so your millage will vary a lot from country to country.

But yes for instance in France it's like that: permanent exclusivity is illegal, though short temporary ones are allowed. Orange (illegal) exclusivity on the iPhone was broken in April 2009 and since then all operators are selling it.

Consequence : 2 million iPhones sold in 2009, more than 50% of the smartphone market shares, and 3G networks that have a hard time following the pace...

"Wouldn't it be great if Apple ran a similarly carrier-independent iPhone store, or Nokia did the same with its smartphone lineup?"

They've done it for years, but not in the US.

http://shop.nokia.co.uk/nokia-uk/searchresults.aspx?search_i...

Funny thing, I was just gonna check out the US Nokia website to see what it would look like without the store, and it turns out they already have one:

http://store.nokia.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/shophome_10...

They might as well have one; they sell more than just phones, and some of their phones (e.g. N900) have not yet been adopted as subsidized models by U.S. carriers.

This becomes pretty obvious when you read their blog announcing the URL/store/Nexus One carefully.

Notice that they mention the online store prior to the Nexus One:

Well, today we're pleased to announce a new way for consumers to purchase a mobile phone through a Google hosted web store. The goal of this new consumer channel is to provide an efficient way to connect Google's online users with selected Android devices. We also want to make the overall user experience simple: a simple purchasing process, simple service plans from operators, simple and worry-free delivery and start-up.

The first phone we'll be selling through this new web store is the Nexus One ... It's the first in what we expect to be a series of products which we will bring to market with our operator and hardware partners and sell through our online store.

(quoting this here because I didn't see it directly quoted in the Ars article)

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/our-new-approach-to-b...

This also might reveal why Verizon's continued support of the CDMA island effectively exempts it from having to compete with carrier-unlocked phones.

It's frustrating as a consumer that Verizon is incompatible with the massive hordes of unlocked GSM phones, but it might be a business advantage in the short-term for Verizon. In the long term, people who want phones like Nexus One will just switch carriers.

according to google.com/phone verizon support is coming in spring 2010. I wonder how they're planning to support that... does the Nexus One also have CDMA built in?

There will be a completely different model with a different radio. There are chips that do CDMA and GSM, but those are usually focused on CDMA domestically and GSM abroad. I don't know if those chip support T-Mobile's somewhat non-standard frequency ranges.

Most likely there will be a separate phone for CDMA. Keeping costs down is important, especially since I believe that, at the same price point, the average consumer will have a hard time choosing a product over the iPhone.

Qualcomm's GOBI platform seems to support basically everything but is currently only available as a miniPCI card: http://www.gobianywhere.com/files/gobi2000_overview.pdf

<speculation>Maybe Apple's tablet will have one of these.</speculation>

In the long run google will probably be competing on something other than price, I'd expect them to roll out a whole pile of android specific service improvements.

Why aren't there chips that support T-Mobile's non-standard frequency ranges in addition to the standard ones? It seems that with the GSM Android phones coming out lately, it's been either one or the other. The Droid Milestone for Telus supports AT&T 3G, but not T-Mobile 3G. Apparently the Nexus One supports T-Mobile 3G, but not AT&T 3G.

Sprint also uses CDMA.

From the very beginning, everything I read convinced me that it's a superior transmission mode, both for me, the end user, and for the carrier.

As much as heavy-handed regulation makes me cringe, perhaps if we legislated modular rf sections, this would become a non-issue. Phones are small enough for that, now.

Traditionally carriers like Sprint and Verizon, that use CDMA have been the more draconian as far as rules go on their network (e.g. locking down phones, only allowing ringtones through their service, disabling bluetooth OBEX on phones, etc). That's why people tend to see GSM carriers in a better light (also because GSM phones are compatible with carriers around the world).

YEah I tried to take an old Sprint phone in to Verizon to get it activated when my wife lost her phone. They said technically it would work, but they were not "allowed" to do it.

I'm not sure about this. By all accounts, Verizon is the one that would win in a straight quality fight, so one would think they would want to compete (and they have been competing on quality terms in their commercials railing on AT&T).

As a former Verizon customer and current iPhone lock-in, I would LOVE to switch from AT&T and Verizon if it were possible with the phone of my choice.

How long before google launches their own mobile carrier?

There are plenty of smaller parties in Europe they could gobble up to get a foothold, gain experience with the tech and the roll out on a much larger scale.

Remember the FCC auction of spectrum? Google was outbid. But if they had not been, they probably would have launched a carrier.

The world is a lot larger than the US, by buying a local European carrier they would be able to do it without having to buy a major US party (which I guess would be even outside their pocketbook).

Google didn't really want to buy spectrum. Schmidt even publicly stated they had no intention to buy the spectrum. They were just after open access to the "C-block" of the spectrum which they got as a stipulation to them making a slightly higher than minimum bid. They got what they wanted, and it wasn't to own the spectrum.

With that said, I don't think google has any real interest in being a carrier, as that isn't where they make their money. They can leverage the mobile network much like the internet and continue to make their truck load of money via targeted ads.

I'm not so sure. The net profit margin of US carriers is half of google's. If they bought or launched their own carrier they would have to reinvent telephony as we know it or their stock and hence stock options would get slammed relentlessly.

I really hope this article is spot on and we'll soon see carriers adopt this trend in the US as they do overseas. I've long lusted after various Sony phones (if only for their aesthetics), but I've never actually bothered to look into how good they are. You can't get them on Verizon and it's the only carrier I'll deal with at the moment. I would love to be able to choose nearly any phone I wanted to use on Verizon's network.

Surely there are larger cell phone manufacturers that could've forced this issue a long time ago, but none of them have stepped up to do so, or so it would seem. So I'm all for Google giving it a shot and I'll keep my fingers crossed that others follow suit.

> In short, what Google announced today wasn't just the Nexus One, but the world's first carrier-independent smartphone store; the Google store is now the only smartphone store in the US where, for every phone on offer, you first pick which phone you want, and then you pick a network and a plan on that network.

Except for all the other stores that do the very same thing. What a strange article.

I wonder why Verizon is coming soon but Sprint is never mentioned. Is Sprint going to lock the Nexus One out of its network even when a CDMA version is available?

This article is hype. There's nothing overly special about selling an unlocked handset anywhere on planet earth.

The US is typically quite a few years behind when it comes to things like this, so maybe it's news to some Americans.

In the case of the Nexus, the two prices are $529.00 and $179.00, and on the basis of that number alone, I know which I'd rather pay.

That article is all hype because the people this is news to, and the target market for a $500 cellphone don't have that big an intersection. I think everyone with a cellphone by now has been exposed to a carrier's store and seen prices for an off-contract phone. Hell, I'm guessing a lot of people have broken phones and been forced to pay off-contract prices - forcing the savvy to at least price out similar phones via alternate channels cough ebay. Pre-iPhone, they'd have a bigger point, but I'd think by now, the consumer smart-phone market (vs big-business' blackberries) is aware of certain things.

Am I being too hopeful?

Is the iPhone a big hit? I thought it was a relatively small proportion of the total phone market.

Yes it's a big hit, and yes it holds a relatively small proportion of the total phone market

This is because the iPhone holds a significant portion of the smartphone market, but the smartphone market makes up only a small percentage of the total market

The recent Morgan Stanley reports on "Mobile Internet Trends" (15. Dec. 09) portray the rapid growth in pretty much detail:

- http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/mobi... [List of Reports]

- http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/pdfs... [PDF, 92 Slides]

I don't know, depends on your definition of "big hit". Is crushing industry expectations and becoming the best selling phone in the world a "big hit"?

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