If you’re plotting and planning your way through Smartphone waters, trying to get your grubby hands on the latest, hottest phone and mobile OS, you’ll need to be very strategic. Either that or willing to drop some dough.
At this point, in order to feed my gadget-habit, I’m carrying two wireless contracts. It’s not cheap, but I see it as a business expense so I can stay on top of and write about new tech.
Thankfully, I’m in a position to do so (I own the company and sign the expense reports).
As an iPhone owner who wanted to be the first on the block to try out the Android 2.0 operating system, I had to bite the bullet and sign up for Verizon.
Now the Google Phone (Nexus One) has hit the scene and it looks like they will be a GSM phone launching on T-mobile. Another network. Another contract. Another termination fee.
The good news is that Google’s also talking about making an unlocked phone available. (This is huge, more on that below.)
In the US, there are two major cell phone network technologies, GSM and CDMA. The phones that operate on them must support those networks, and generally it is either-or.
Verizon and Sprint have CDMA networks
AT&T, Cingular, and T-mobile are on GSM networks.
Beyond that, most phones are “locked” into a single provider. So even if you have a GSM phone, if it is locked, you may only be able to use it on one network. The networks can unlock it for you, but they may only do that after your contract is up, if at all. And what good is an unlocked phone that’s two+ years old?
The Google Nexus One will be a GMS phone. So even if I can get an unlocked phone, I will not be able to use it on the Verizon account.
I may, however, be able to use it on my AT&T account by dropping my iPhone’s SIM into the Google phone. If this is possible, I bet this is the crux of their strategy for releasing an unlocked phone. Contracts are the big reason people don’t switch phones as it is painfully expensive to break contracts and switch providers.
Google doesn’t have much hope of getting millions to pay AT&T $175 for nothing and switch to another 2 year contract at T-mobile. Never mind ending up with expensive iPod Touch.
But I can see millions of people picking up an unlocked Google phone to try out with their existing AT&T service. I know I will. Talk about driving a wedge into the iPhone’s user base.
If all that happens I’ll probably drop the Verizon account and pay through the nose a termination fee for the privilege of owning the Droid phone. The cost of being a hopeless geek.
Got Droid Envy?
If you’re already a Verizon customer, and you love the device itself, go for it.
But if you’re more keen on the Android OS than the device itself, given the Google announcement, I’d say hold your horses. You likely won’t be able to use the new Google phone on Verizon.
