This has been bugging me for years.
I watched a documentary a few weeks ago. The documentary was about the birth of the mobile telecommunications. It correctly attributed the birth of one of the earliest networks as such as MTS, a US technology, developed by Bell. It went downhill from there. From the 40s into the 50s into the 60s into the 70s into the 80s and 90s.
The only companies you’d see interviewed above single lines were AT&T and Motorola. The revolutionary NMT system was skipped over as an aside in two sentences. There were about 40 seconds in the entire documentary about how japanese phones were different - not better, just different - than US phones.
I’d like to introduce the Waffle Scale of Mobile Phone Cluelessness to explain this phenomenon. You see, Asia - Japan and South Korea in particular - has the most clue of all. Then comes Europe - Scandinavia, the UK, Germany and France in particular. Rank bottom come the US. Sometimes, the places shuffle a small bit, but no more than temporarily.
Asia has always been at the leading edge, getting flip mobile phones with color displays into everyone’s hands at a time when we the rest of us were cheering for another one-bit line in our screen, and providing internet services (or something resembling them) ahead of WAP. Europe has had a bunch of good manufacturers (Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Siemens), a hand in the defining standards (like NMT, or the same GSM standard that introduced SMS, the standard behind ‘texting’) and above all healthy competition when it comes to network operators.
The US, however… I’m not sure I can say this nicely. In a country divided into 50 states, you decided to not go for operator coverage across the entire country or across the entire state, but in distinct cities. Your only mobile phone manufacturer worth mentioning is Motorola, a two-hit pony (StarTAC and Razr) with a history of distinctly useless phones.
This is not anti-americanism. I am not anti-american (though I’m scared at times at how isolated some of you are). No, there’s an important lesson to learn: mobile phones have failed in the US until just recently. You’re still miles after the rest of the world on most planes. Motorola is not all that and a bag of chips.
This is how I dare feel confident in laughing my ass off at some people’s startling lack of mobile phone industry suave - like the 900 analysts (armchair and regular asshole flavor) telling me $500 is too much for a smartphone. $500 may be a lot in the american market due to the insane bonding between operators and phones - which, don’t get me wrong, the rest of the world gets too, but sees as completely obnoxious even in smaller doses - that stops people from getting what they want. But while the big country in the west was having fun just discovering SMS, the rest of the world was selling smartphones - and higher-end regular mobile phones, I might add - for fees approaching $1000 to people who were already having sensible contracts. And they sold.
In fact, people who don’t bind their mobile phones up to contracts still buy their phones separately. If anything, $500 is where it starts for smartphones. The by far best selling mobile phone (and in my opinion one of the genuinely best phones ever) a few years back was Sony Ericsson’s brilliant T610. In Sweden, it sold for around $400, and it was worth it, and everyone knew that.
(I am sure this whole post will earn me the ire of a few rabid US nationalists - as if I was pointing out that if you name your national league of a sport the “world series” of something, you’re an asshole - but so be it. I am not trying to poke my US readers in the eyes, just describe how the world looks. If you’re upset, please untie the stars and stripes from your chest, sit down and assess reality for a second.)