Windows Phone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"If you thought you were annoyed when one of the big wireless carriers locked up a phone you were after, you have no idea how frustrated small and rural wireless carriers are -- they've just filed a petition with FCC seeking to ban the practice. The 80 companies in the Rural Cellular Association serve small markets not well-covered by the big guys, like parts of New Mexico, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming, and they say that carrier exclusivity deals not affect their bottom line, but also deprive consumers of desirable phones like the iPhone and upcoming Blackberry Bold. They've actually got a pretty good point: lots of rural customers can't purchase and use an iPhone without technically breaking the AT&T service agreement. We'll see how this one goes -- although we'd love nothing more than to use any phone we wanted on any carrier, there are plenty of reasons it won't happen, and exclusivity is the easiest way for carriers to differentiate themselves to consumers."



As a consumer I really hope that in the coming years we start to see an end to all of the exclusivity contracts. I can understand them to a point but in the case of the iPhone, as mentioned above, was five years really necessary? Also I think the iPhone is a horrible example of a handset to use an example here since a lot of the rural carriers I can think of off the top of my head all run off of CDMA networks and the iPhone is a GSM and soon to be HSDPA handset. Even if the exclusivity deal was not in place, do you really expect Apple to make a CDMA version just to be fair to the little guys? A lot of high-end handsets have trouble selling in densely populated areas and if there is not enough customer demand to convince the big five to open shops in those rural areas, what makes the little carriers think they could even secure those fancy handsets in the first place?

"Windows Mobile does have and support voice-enabled functions, but this is an interesting twist. Due to better support for Java, Microsoft's Tellme subsidiary is offering its voice search for Blackberry devices before it goes live on Windows Mobile handsets. Tellme keeps track of where you are through your phone's GPS radio so your search results are local to where you are... Device owners can tap a button and speak their search query; in return, Tellme will offer local results using the Microsoft Live Search engine."



You know what? I'm not really too broken up about this. Don't get me wrong, I think the idea is pretty cool in theory but to quote Lawrence Peter Berra - "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not". As amazing as Microsoft's Voice Command service is on our handsets the one major drawback I have always encountered is that it just does not work very well at all if you are not in a quiet room. Same thing goes for voice enable telecom services! Every time I try to use anything voice enabled and there is any noise in the background whatsoever then the service flat out fails... unless I yell my command into the microphone but then you just end up looking insane. This is the exact reason why I have stopped demoing the Voice Command feature for people who are interested in learning more about my phone.

Who knows, maybe this is a Trojan horse for Microsoft to make all Blackberry users look crazy while they shout into their handsets - aggravating them to the point where they switch over to Windows Mobile devices.