16 Sep
2012
16 Sep
'12
10:42 a.m.
On 16 September 2012 18:23, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 09/16/2012 01:00 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
I don't know about that. My perception, as a Londoner who uses public
transport heavily, I see a /lot/ of Blackberries even today.
Until about 4-5y ago, they were the SuitPhone. You pretty much only
found them clamped in the pallid pasty paws of workers in the
corporate machine, hooked into the enterprise email backbone,
monitored and timed and measured, so that the slaves were never free
of their overlords.
The new iPhone - pre-apps and pre-3G - did great and became the
non-techie's phone of choice.
RIM responded with a big expensive ad campaign about the multimedia
and games abilities of the Blackberry, and as a result sold millions
of the things to teens. This is fading now - iPhone is winning - but
for 3-4y the changes are that if the phone user had acne, bad hair and
bad clothes, the piece of electronics they'd be hunched over was a
Blackberry.
The hardcore high-volume texters still favour them. They're also
/very/ cheap now, I think.
The whole rest of the world has one mobile phone
system, GSM, whereas
the USA has its own weird one and competing telcos in every city and
state meant that phones could not be used from one place to the next
/in the same country./
You guys even pay to /receive/ text messages!
It looks like pathetic, chaotic madness from over here.
It's the only reason Blackberry took off with its wretched glorified
pagers; that the US phone system was so broken, random and unreliable
that mobile phones didn't take off. When the whole rest of the planet
was going over to cellphones, out of North America we got a souped-up
two-way pager that gradually added phone functionality on.
Complete insanity.
Yes. But remember, in the case of the Blackberry, it's more of a
status symbol than anything else; there have always been better
communication devices. (or at least it "was" a status symbol...now it's
more of an "oh, how quaint, one of the six remaining people with a
Blackberry" symbol) As far as the insanity, and paying to receive text
messages...American
companies artificially create an atmosphere in which the customers view
them as figures of authority, so they will be more obedient when it
comes to purchasing things. Very rarely will an American question
ANYTHING about a product or service, instead preferring to just pay
whatever is demanded, and accept whatever they get in return. Combine
that with the general attitude that "cheaper is better, even when it
isn't", and you begin to see why utter trash like Wal*Mart (the
McDonald's of retail) and McDonald's (the Wal*Mart of food) becomes so
pervasive here...and craziness like paying to receive text messages.
In the end, we truly deserve the poor products and services that we
get, because the vast VAST majority of us just aren't smart enough to
demand more. Its really quite pathetic, and embarrassing.
I would not dare to disagree.
I did find a recent Reddit thread about this amusing.
An American poster was complaining about mobile costs.
A Brit posted "TIL Americans pay to receive texts". (Today I Learned.)
The Europeans were all amused, in a horrified but condescending sort of way.
The Americans were astounded. They had no idea that only they paid to
receive as well as send.
It was, overall, hilarious.
This is not the original article but a response to it, I think:
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/hf0g3/til_that_most_of_the_w…
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884