In the advent of the new iphone, several things were made clear. This phone not only refined popular smart phone function, but implemented iphone-only functions. According to Apple, ‘Random Access Voicemail’ allows one to access any voicemail message, in any order by simply clicking on it from a list. With the long touted all digital networks, with 3g, high speed CDMA EV-DO and GSM networks crisscrossing the country, why is this being implemented only now?
Apple ran into the same walls as most phone manufacturers do in the effort to bring their product to a wireless carrier. Networks regularly demand special treatment in the form of proprietary applications, charges for services built into a phone or flat out crippled hardware. Is the industry out of innovation? Or does it go deeper? Some would say the networks are so focused on eeking out every dollar from the consumers, they have stagnated themselves.
Notice the smart phones of the modern age have the same features for accessing voicemail, and sending data. No company has any particular feature another hasn’t. It’s all about coverage and how much it costs to send a picture. Where are the live instant messengers? WIFI conferencing? Why are the integrated smart features only are available to the >$500 phones? How about video conferencing? Advertised features on TV today are the same features introduced when everything was analog. Call people on your own network for free, huh? Push to talk? That was Nextell back in 1999. Camera on your phone? Wooo! This is 2007, yet we are still using the same format for voicemail and phonecalls. Granted there is a demand for cheap hardware, and there are only so many things you can cram into a phone, but Apples voicemail protocols are being implemented on an entire network.
In fact, since the switch from Analog to digital, Wireless carriers have not only raised the price of their 'basic' plans, but they've done away with the $20 per month 'emergency phone plan', and pushed what qualified as a 'night' from 7pm to 9pm. Weren't these companies telling us digital was CHEAPER?
Why, did it take a company like APPLE to force a major national network to add a feature that anyone in their right mind would have paid for long ago?
