Verizon Tries No Contract Engagements

In an interesting twist from Verizon, a company that has traditionally focused on being closed and in control, they have introduced no contract service plans. The general gist of this is that you pay full price for your hardware and there is no contract obligation. This is very European of them! 

This is the plan that ATT and Apple should have engaged in for the original iPhone, which was purchased without carrier subsidy. But like all non-jailbroken Gen 1 iPhones, I am tied to a 2 year ATT contract.

Sure, folks like Sprint and T-Mo have had some kind of no-contract plan in place for a while, but the tend to be special plans, or have a higher monthly price that contracted plans. Verizon has taken a huge step forward in creating a fairly frictionless marketplace. (In a true frictionless marketplace, consumers could use any phone on any network and change carriers atany time without penalty.) Verizon has really mitigated its risk here because the only place one can go with a Verizon CDMA phone is to Sprint, and frankly, I haven't heard anyone clamoring to sign up with Sprint in ages. So Verizon is pretty safe.

This option does completely open the flood gates for Verizon's Any Phone program that they announced earlier in the year. For a certain group of customers who wish to have a special device, once the handset is approved for use on the Verizon network, you could buy a phone directly from a retailer or manufacturer and jump on Verizon with no contractual risk.

That is pretty sweet!

The (Un) Importance of the Android Google G1

I think that the new Android-powered G1 is awesome. It is open. It has a ton of features, and it is built from the ground up to be futzed with. It is meant to be tinkered with, expanded upon, grown, shaped, morphed and transmorgrified into a powerful platform.

Who cares? Android doesn't matter. Neither does the iPhone. WinMo? Forget about it? Linux? Puh-leese.

Why don't these things matter? Well, hyping an OS or a device is like saying that your Dell laptop is better than my Sony, or that my iMac is better than your Gateway. The only things that matter are the browsers. Hardware and the OS don't really matter. The only thing that matters is how well your mobile data device can access the cloud. Opera, Webkit, Mobile Safari, Chrome Lite, and hopefully soon Firefox Mobile, these are the only things that matter.

On my PC, the only application I use is the browser. (On my PC, I like Chrome, and on my Mac I use Firefox.) On my phone (which is an iPhone) the only application I use regularly is the browser (and the Mail app, but it just pulls down GMail). All of the other apps on my phone are just interesting ways to pull down data from the cloud. Google Maps on the iPhone is just a single purpose browser for maps.google.com. My @Bat from MLB is just a single purpose browser that delivers the MLB WAP site. Facebook, Twitter, etc. they are all just tweaked browsers.

Larry Ellison and his failed NIC plan wasn't wrong, he was just early. With the rise of Netbooks and smartphones, it is all about the cloud. Locally stored data and local computing power are modestly anachronistic. In the mobile world, as long as a phone can make and receive calls, almost all other data functions are completely reliant on the connection to the cloud. Stick Opera on any phone an it immediately gets better. It gets you more access to the world. Build the data features of the phone around a great browser and your OS doesn't matter.

And that, my friends, is the (Un)Importance of the Android Google G1. (But Webkit and Chrome Lite, and Mobile Safari, and Opera, and mobile Mozilla are the most important developments in mobile history since the voice channel).