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I don't even know where to begin. Apple is the one that made the decision to stay with ATT so it's their own damn fault. As Apple loves to say, it's the end user experience that matters. Apple has stuck by ATT for two reasons: Control and Money. At a severe cost to users.

You think his opinion has less merit because he got it for free? That is just laughable. Brad Feld has more credibility and money than you or I will probably have in our entire lifetime. Completely irrelevant.

Apple has stuck with AT&T because they signed a long term contract to give AT&T exclusivity. They had to do that in order to get the phone out. They had approached the other carriers, and no one else was interested in carrying the phone unless the carrier got to control the design of the software. If Apple had not been willing to give exclusivity, its likely AT&T too would have passed on the iPhone.

Without iPhone, there would not be Android. Even if Google had still developed it, they would have had the same problem Apple had--phone companies not willing to let Google be in charge of the software.

It's only because Verizon and Sprint and the rest desperately needed something to compete with iPhone that they were willing to allow Android.

without iphone there would be no androidd?

August 2005 is when apple bought the android OS form android Inc..way before iphone OS was even coded.

I think you mean Google bought android. And really, you have no idea when the iPhoneOS was even coded, but given that it is based on OSX coding started well before 2005.

But I think the real question is what Android would have been without the iPhone, because even after the iPhone shipped, Android was looking rather a lot like a conventional smartphone OS.

You may not know where to begin with your comments about the Apple and AT&T relationship, but that would mostly be because you Don't Get It. It's not just about control and money; these matter, but less than you think.

By choosing AT&T, Apple chose GSM, which gave the iPhone compatibility with most of the world. They looked at CDMA and realized that it was a dead-end technology; they looked at the expense of having to maintain two different radio chipsets; they looked at a lot of things and made the decision that, at least up until now, they didn't want to deal with it. Apple has relationships with three GSM carriers in Canada (Rogers/Fido, Bell, and Telus) and many more elsewhere in the world. If T-Mobile had used the more common GSM frequencies, Apple might not have gone with an exclusive deal with AT&T. Maybe.

On the other hand, my immediate reaction on seeing the story title was "who is Brad Feld and why should I care that he's switching?"

Seriously. Looking at his CrunchBase profile, I can see that he does VC stuff now and built a fairly large consulting company, but I am still not sure that I should care about his opinions about consumer electronics. So I do think that his opinion has less merit because he got this particular device for free. (Money isn't credibility. To me, he's just some random guy with a platform. A blogger with no relevance to anything that I do.)

IMO, a consumer who has loyalty to a particular device or technology is a fool. If someone really comes up with something that I can unequivocally say is better than my iPhone, I will switch. So far, Android is "close but no cigar".

You are completely wrong. The expense of maintaining two different radios is nothing compared to the extra millions of devices they would have sold. This is so wrong that it is embarrassing that people use this as a point.

How much do you think it costs to buy a standard part, and hire a dozen engineers to get it all working??

How much do you think it costs to buy a standard part, and hire a dozen engineers to get it all working??

My experience with embedded hardware type startups would lead me to think you would pretty much double your FCC registration process/expenses, add about 50% overhead to your QA budget to basically test everything twice, add about 20% to your hardware layout budget (unless the two chips are highly pin and form-factor compatible), and a few other incidentals. On top of the other extra basic engineering code to "get it all working".

Then of course you also have to WANT to have the unit on the carrier that you added the CDMA chipset for in the first place.

The harder part to gamble on in a situation like this is: how many people will switch carriers to get a truly hot device? If you get it right (as Apple has appeared to), a large majority of people will pick the phone over the carrier. I'm sure they would have sold more iPhones to date than the current number if they had a CDMA version, but I'm not convinced it would have been a truly significant number overall.

Anyway, that's my rough experience with hardware design. What's your perspective on the added costs?

It's so expensive, they're not coming out with a CDMA iPhone this year.

Oh wait. They are? Huh. They must just have decided that the masses want iPhones. If they have to lose money on them... oh wait, you mean that isn't how business works?

I'm not wrong, though. Sure, the engineering costs are fairly small as a percentage of the cost of the device (a quick search suggests $18/chipset), but that's not the only costs involved. The power consumption of that chipset is not clear compared to the GSM chipsets that they use; battery life matters.

The extra SKUs matter: if Apple is selling these phones directly (always a key part of their strategy, at least in the U.S.), how do they make sure that the customers buy the right one for their preferred carrier?

Training in carrier plans and pricing matters: How much training do they have to do with their employees about the different rate plans for different carriers? Configuring a CDMA phone on the cellular network is also more work than plugging in the correct SIM. The training differences involved are substantial and fundamentally against the way that Apple works: as simple as can possibly be done.

The quality of service/experience difference matters: would you care to explain to a customer why their buddy's iPhone on AT&T can browse the web while talking yet their "exact same iPhone" on Verizon can't?

There are lots of other extra costs that may or may not be covered by having a CDMA version that could reach a few million extra CDMA subscribers. Worldwide, there's ~142M CDMA EVDO subscribers as of 4Q 2009 (via cdg.org) and ~506M GSM 3G subscribers. The worldwide market for CDMA phones is ~500M, whereas the equivalent GSM one is ~4B. Apple made the right choice.

Here in Canada, Rogers's service doesn't suck (at least in the big cities), although their pricing sort of does (not enough competition). Bell and Telus switched to a shared GSM network (they're running both GSM/HSPA+ and CDMA until they can get enough of their customers switched to GSM phones to make it feasible to kill the older network). This was done mostly because they were preferred carrier for the Olympics this past year, and they didn't want all those Europeans roaming on the Rogers network, but it was done.

I personally predict that when Verizon has a major LTE rollout (which is essentially GSM), there will be a Verizon iPhone.

Where are you getting your GSM 3G subscriber data from?

GSA (http://gsacom.com); roughly equivalent to the CDG for GSM.

Nokia spent millions trying.

The problem is that very rarely is a platform "unequivocally" better than another. If you're waiting for that expect to wait a long time. We have to make subjective assessments. Loyalty is one of those subjective things. I don't think we are fools for it. In fact it seems like you are pretty loyal to Apple.

I'm not loyal to Apple, though.

Yes, I currently am heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem with an iPod touch, iPhone, iMac, iPad, and a few other devices floating around.

Yes, I could be charitably called an Apple fan-boy at this point.

No, I won't stay with Apple if their build quality and/or experience quality goes down and someone has a viable alternative.

I don't have the money to throw around on lots of different devices, so I need to figure out what I'm going to buy that's going to last me 2 - 5 years (depending on the product and purpose). Right now, that's Apple.

When I'm ready to replace? We'll see then what the answer is. Five years ago, my answer wasn't Apple (it was leaning toward it, and the switch to Intel made it easier, but it wasn't there yet). Five years from now, my answer may or may not be Apple. It's up to Apple to convince me that they remain better than their competitors for me to stay.

When Palm OS came out, it was better than the others (which I guess were those old e-diaries). When Windows CE came out, it was better than Palm. When iPhone OS came out, it was better than anything else that was out there.

Now, things are a lot harder. iPhone is still great, Android is doing really well, clearly catching up. Palm Webos is also good, and Windows Mobile 7 would probably be a worthy contender when it appears. BB is getting more consumer friendly, and Nokia have some great OS as well. Looking at Mobile OS, it seems you are right now, but in the past it was a lot easier.

No copy and paste on the Windows Mobile 7? What kind of worthless device is that!

/joke

I don't think it is that simple. Apple wanted a lot more control than carries were willing to allow. They approached Verizon, since they were the largest carrier at the time, and they laughed at them. They were not willing to change the way they operated, for some new upstart. Things like visual voicemail would not work with Verizon. You need to understand that carriers are the top dogs, they have great influence over phone manufacturers. Maybe you forget the bad old days, when Verizon would disable bluetooth and computer syncing on your phone, for their own reasons. Those days are mostly gone now, THANKS TO APPLE!

Apple had little clout at the time, and only ATT was willing to working with them. For now, they are still stuck with each other.

While Verizon/Spring may have better coverage in certain areas, they are complete dicks.

While Verizon/Spring may have better coverage in certain areas, they are complete dicks.

As a Sprint rep, I resent that. You may have had a bad experience with somebody on the phone, but to generalize all Sprint (or Verizon for that matter) employees as dicks is not appropriate.

Sorry, not talking about the employees.

I am talking about the control carriers used to exert on hardware manufacturers like Motorola, Nokia, etc... Whereas you could get the same device in Europe or the US, but the US version would be crippled because the carriers only wanted you to get ringtones from their store, wanted you to pay extra for bluetooth, and wanted an ad on the start page.

Which means you couldn't use Motorola software to backup your device, somtimes you couldn't run Java apps, and so many other problems.

... all of which stopped a fair while ago. IIANM you can root your Verizon Android phone if you want to.

And why did it stop?

I suggest it was Apple's iPhone which put an end to this madness, just as I said in my first comment.

Do you have any evidence you could offer?

You think his opinion has less merit because he got it for free? That is just laughable.

Yes, I do think that. Giving away high-valued items for free to influential people at love-fests (nothing against the Google I/O event, but it's as much a marketing event as a tech-event) is a method used by all kinds of "luxury goods" manufacturers as a marketing/promotion scheme.

What's is Feld's credibility here? He's done some other things, so when he comes off a few days of events essentially designed to promote and highlight the device he just got for free I should follow his lead? Because he's made some VC investments? Sorry, but I think this post does more to destroy his credibility than build it. Maybe if he posted this after a full month of Android-only usage, or maybe if he also spent some characters describing what ISN'T so super duper great on the Android platform his post would have seemed far less fanboi and far more credible.

"You think his opinion has less merit because he got it for free? That is just laughable. Brad Feld has more credibility and money than you or I will probably have in our entire lifetime. Completely irrelevant."

Clearly there is a lot you don't know about human psychology. Try reading "Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini. Gifts, even trivial and unwanted gifts, make people feel obligation to the gift-giver.

Face it, whatever Android's merits, Google is leaving nothing to chance by buying a lot of good will with shipping containers worth of expensive gifts.

As for your rant about the AT&T relationship's cost to users: If Apple hadn't done that deal, what would the mobile device ecosystem look like today and how would that be for users? Before the iPhone, the carriers were so firmly in control, it was obscene. You think Apple's app store terms are draconian? Try getting in to one of the old mobile application stores. You think Google would have any leverage in the mobile space without the iPhone?

Look, AT&T sucks (not that my prior experience with Verizon was great), I'm reminded about that every day when 1/4 of my commute is plagued with slow-ass Internet even though I have a nice strong signal, but your cynicism is giving you selective blindness.

I'm reminded of all the "wintel" hate among Linux advocates a decade or so ago. There was a lot to hate, but without the economics of the Microsoft/Intel world, its pretty damn hard to imagine the cheap & powerful computing hardware that made an open source OS anything but a curiosity for academics and a small number of hobbyists.

> What about the unbearable shittiness of Windows in general?

No - iTunes is in a separate class of shittiness altogether.

Two bits:

1) The pragmatics of the platform means that iPhone == AT&T. You have to get both, so it's fair to box them together.

2) Mobile flash runs great on my Nokia N900. Even streaming full-screen video.

Is there a way to switch it off? I do not look forward to going back to loads of ads on a page, especially if they are flash.

Yes, of course. Maemo is a platform built on belief in giving users a choice.

Ok, can you switch it off easily in the software, or do you need to recompile. Can you switch it on on a flash app basis, so a screen might have an ad and a video, then you can play the video only?

If so, that is great. I still don't miss Flash on my iPhone, and definately want to still keep on missing it.

On my N810, I can switch it off in the default browser as a what seems to be per-process setting. It takes three touches to toggle it from the main browsing screen. I don't know what it is on the N900, but I really doubt they'd downgrade it to a compile option.

Other browsers available on the platform might have different functionalities — in particular, the alpha/beta of Opera Mobile has click-to-Flash—like functionality.

How is the battery life with streaming video? I do not own an N900, but I everything I have seen and heard from people who did buy them is that the battery life is shit.

I haven't owned any other smartphones, but the N900 battery life seems OK. It easily lasts a day if I use it heavily (browsing, tethering, GPS mapping, etc). If I just use it as a phone/instant messaging device I end up charging every other day.

For me, iPhone == Rogers or iPhone == Bell or iPhone == Telus.

When Verizon is on LTE, we'll probably see multiple iPhone carriers in the U.S.

iPhone OS 4.0 addresses some of the email limitations (unified inbox), 3.x had tethering (apparently, it's coming to AT&T with 4.0), 4.0 has a form of battery-saving multitasking, etc. It's a horse race and there's going to be endless one-upsmanship back and forth.

What Froyo has that's great is over-the-air download & built-in intents-over-the-air (e.g., send a URL or a map to your phone, something I've longed for on the iPhone since forever; I guess someone should make an app for that plus a browser extension).

It'll be interesting to see if Apple can shift quickly enough in the two weeks before WWDC to address some of the remaining advantages that Android has over iPhone OS. I suspect not. They're known for establishing a course and pretty much following it inexorably.

I can d/l over the air with my iPhone. I can send a map link around as well. I guess you are talking about something else altogether.

All hail Google?

In a year everyone will remember what a nightmare Google really is.

iPhone OS will never have the ability to do the things like Android like push-intents until Apple admits that what iPhone OS 4 brings is not even remotely close to multitasking and that their model wouldn't allow for push intents. They claim battery and stability but my phone is stable now with multitasking and my battery lasts a full day.

An iPhone application has no way of having a long living listener for something that would resemble a push intent. The only thing you can do is register small bits of code as video/voip/audio services that can run in the background. Anything more advanced than that is reserved for Android or true multitasking OSes.

Oh horseshit. Apple's model could easily be extended to allow apps to register code that is executed when something is pushed to the phone.

The more I think about this, the sillier your assertion seems that having your application running in the background is a necessity for functionality like push-intents. Its like you are saying that without all your apps running code running all the time, Windows or the Mac won't know what app to use when you double click on a file. And if you want an example of how to offer a range of network services without having to keep all of them running all the time, try reading about inetd. Its a pretty new idea, but I'm sure you can find something about it.

Is this really the sort of argument Apple would like to be having?

"Your cellular service sucks." "Yeah, but that's because we're locked in to a sucky provider."

"I can't tether through my phone." "Yeah, but that's because we're locked in to a sucky provider."

"Your desktop software sucks." "Yeah, but we think this other software sucks more."

I thought Apple was the one who figured all that matters in the end is user experience.

"Yes, AT&T service has been pretty shitty. It's hard to make this a direct knock against the iPhone..."

Excuse the crassness but bull shit. Apple chose AT&T. Apple committed to AT&T. AT&T today is as much a part of the iPhone as the display, the OS, the camera, anything. Indeed, more so, since Apple signed a 5 year, exclusive contract with AT&T and the hardware has changed and will change many times in that period.

If Apple signed an exclusive contract with some LCD manufacturer and was forced to deal with sub-quality displays nobody would cut them any slack. Apple made a choice in the design and implementation of the iPhone by choosing AT&T as an exclusive provider, they have to live with that choice.

This is an absolutely valid criticism of the iPhone.