Take Back Your Cell

article

I love the Internet because I can plug anything I want into it. No ISP tells me what computer I can use or what software it can run. Contrast that with the phone networks. Until 1968, it was illegal to even attach a non-Bell phone. Even today, phone companies charge for services like Caller ID. Imagine if your ISP charged you for seeing the “From” line in your e-mail.

Mobile-phone companies have inherited this arrogance, building their business models around nickel-and-diming customers. They sell you phones that can play musical ringtones and then force you to buy the song snippets you want to use, even if you already own the CD. They give you color screens for better gaming but charge you $7 for Tetris. They give you data but lock you into their Web browsers and charge you by the second to use them. Unlike my PC, there’s no freeware and no choice.

Yet I’m a net-head who learned to love phones again—specifically, smartphones such as the Sony Ericsson P900, the Nokia 6620 and the Treo 650. All come with operating systems ready to run software of your choosing because they’re made by manufacturers who treat you, not your carrier, as the real customer. If there’s something you want your phone to do, chances are that someone has built an app to do it that you can download and install, without paying the carrier’s monopoly pricing. When you can do that, the phone is truly yours.

After all my bitching about cell phones, this article is music to my ears. I believe the Sony phone costs a bit too much - over $500 is out of my price range. The Nokia 6620, however, doesn't seem too bad, though it isn't pretty. I'm still waiting for a 10gb harddrive and a headphone jack (or do these phones have that already?), as I don't want to spend $300 on a phone and $150 more on an iPod. Besides, the 128MB memory cards that these phones have are expensive - the Nokia 6620's cost $100.
My current cellphone is a brownish gray device that was officially 'vintage' when I got it a year ago. Mind you, my parents picked it out because it was the cheapest.


On a different note, is it possible to hook a classic phone into a computer modem and use that to talk over the internet? I know that such would require new software (if not also hardware), but I am asking if it's feasible, not if I can do it tomorrow and expect it to work. That would be a nice turn to Voice-Over-Net technology, which is kind enough to not bullshit me with long distance charges, which should e extinct due to modern communication infrastructure. After all, it costs nothing to download a website from the other side of the Atlantic because of the trans-atlantic phone line that goes from the US, through Iceland, and finally to Britain (other lines cross the English Channel into mainland Europe), and the website is downloaded through the same line that I'd use for a phone.