The Future of Phones: Unlocked

I’ve read some this week about the complaints about the new Google Nexus One Android phone.  I got one this past week to test and develop with and have been impressed.  More on that in another post.  Like the Nokia N900 you can only buy it unlocked.  No carrier rebates.  I am tending to think that this is the future of phone buying.  Sure, you will still be able to buy a subsidized phone for at least a few years… but I think that by 2012 most smart phones will be purchased unlocked at full price.  In fact, I think folks will buy their ‘phone’ as a portable computing device.  They’ll demand to be able to move to carriers that can offer them the coverage, service, and pricing that makes the best sense for them.   Consumers will wake up to the fact that locking in to a two year contract is effectively going to cost them more that the extra money for the phone.

Think about it.  You get a few hundred dollars off the cost of the phone but then are LOCKED to that plan for two years.  The coming price and feature war between Sprint’s new 4G network, Verizon’s rollout of 3G, the shift of AT&T to a new world that is more than the iPhone playground… we’re going to want to take advantage of those dropping prices.  T-Mobile is already offering month-to-month.  $60 gets you a month of unlimited SMS and internet and 500 minutes of call time.  Use Skype and it’s unlimited talk time.  The phone network is going all IP and the era of the voice network is coming to an end.  Finally.   I hoped to help bring this about a decade ago when I was with Quicknet building the MicroTelco system.  It’s nice to see that the market has brought this around finally.

What’s really enabling this is the power of the smart phone hardware *and* the effect of Android.  I’ve been down on Android for it’s tendency to fragment the market and I’ve whined philosophically about how nice it would be if Nokia’s Maemo could be a unifying force.  But the power of Android is evident all around me.  It’s basically a radical sea change in the nature of phone software development.  The walled gardens are down – the thorned buses surrounding the pristine revenue gardens of the carriers are burned to the ground and the gates are thrown open to innovation and access.  As much as this might open the phones to possible malware, it also open the ecosystem to radical new possibilities.  Android is already running on tablets and lots of other mobile devices – and it will be on more and more.  Why?  Because it’s open.  Because there is no walled garden.  Because it’s basically a solid linux core with a reasonable set of API functionality on top.  It’s not just about the phones, it’s about the mobile device ecosystem, and the fact that the leash that was the carriers is now off forever.

Smartphone, PDA, handheld computer, whatever…  call it what you wish.  But the power of a gigahertz processor with 3D video coprocessing, decent memory, some storage, and connectivity is going to enable a whole new way normal people use computers.  By ‘normal’ I mean non-techie geeks – regular folks.  Making a voice call is just one of the things you can do with these devices… and a very minor thing at that.

The future, my friends, is unlocked.  In more ways than one.  And I could not be more excited about it.

Tell me what you think about our unlocked future!  Leave a comment.  Should be fun.