Calling All Cellphone Carriers: America Needs Innovation

First and foremost it’s the fault of the service providers.

Why the rigidity? Why the inability to work with creative and innovative companies to push the progress of what a phone can do? Instead of making phones smaller and shinier, why not try to incorporate things into phones that we as consumers don’t even know we need yet?

When the iPhone was brought to Verizon, they sent Apple away, dismissing Steve Jobs and company’s requests for freedom within their network as crazy talk. AT&T, maybe sensing what was to come (or what should come), took the dive and allowed Apple to run more freely than anyone ever has when working with cell phone providers, allowing revenue sharing, Visual Voicemail, a full iTunes store a cell phone and then the App Store. But when the iPhone captured the hearts of gadget-lovers in America, Japan sat unscathed, texting away on phones that were years ahead of phones on the American market.

Japanese Cellphone Vending Machine

Image used under Creative Commons license, original from d0ug&r0byn @ Flickr

The iPhone’s success here, or rather its lack of success in Japan has to do with one major factor: the home computer, a piece of technology that the iPhone relies heavily on for music dumping and software updates, a piece of technology that is not as widely embraced in Japan as it is in the States.

There they use their cell phones for everything from making phone calls to recording videos, playing music and paying for drinks at vending machines so why don’t we? After the carrier’s inflexibility, it’s only fair to blame the other side of the coin, the companies that make and provide the phones that we use.

Japan’s seasonal lines are scrapped across the Pacific for phones that are churned out by the week with poor interfaces and cheap touch screens. Samsung’s latest venture is a group of phones that set out to either rip off the iPhone or capture people too stubborn to switch off of Verizon, I’m not entirely sure yet. It’s too bad that Samsung doesn’t have half of the engineering prowess that Apple does and subsequently turns out phones that Verizon won’t recommend to you in their stores for the simple fact that they don’t want to deal with you in a few weeks when it breaks.

I’m tired of the choice between the expensive smart phone or the cheap, breakable piece of plastic. I’m tired of going back to the store two months after I buy a phone to get a new one because the old one stopped working.

It’s time that American cell phone companies embrace what technology can do in terms of innovating the cell phone market. Why not do things the way that the Japanese do, incorporating e-wallets into phones with RFID chips and cameras that aren’t 1.5 megapixel pieces of junk? We as customers need to demand from providers freedom in our contracts, the ability to customize our plans to fit exactly what we do with our phones. Everyone is different, shouldn’t our cell phone plans reflect our needs? Moreover, our phones should reflect our personalities instead of the drones in I,Robot.

I want freedom and I want it now! I just don’t want to move to Japan.