If you’re a family with plenty of compute/visual horsepower already, I suppose an iPad would be a luxury. But this honestly IS a completely different experience in terms of news and information apps, book reading, movie/TV watching, etc.

Were the device $1000 or more, you might want to question it. But, at a $499 entry price (wi-fi only), it’s not a reach for most.

Good luck!

I’m well aware that the profit margin would be small. It wouldn’t even drive a profit, I guess — it’s not like these guys have a huge choice of phones to buy with their meagre incomes.

It’s just about giving people in Africa and Asia, those with 5-year-old Nokia phones (or whatever they use) a set of built-in apps that actually HELP their lifestyle.

Just an advanced calendar app would be amazing, I’m sure

Actually GSM is almost “universal” – it’s technologically unified but operates at frequencies 850 MHz and 1900 MHz in North America, and at frequencies 900 MHz and 1800 MHz bands in the rest of the world. Smartphones and high-end feature phones are typically “tri-band” – two frequencies to support their “home” carrier and one to support any “foreign” area. Low-end phones adopt only their “home” frequencies (and, thus, can not “roam” to across major geos. The very highest-end phones are quad-band.

But, to your question. Remember, many feature phones run proprietary RTOSes which do not have an exposed SDK. All development has to be done by the phone manufacturer or a very tiny set of closely-held OEMs. Nokia S30/S40 are open, but it’s also true that most modern feature phones have Java. If a carrier wanted an app written, they’d probably commission it in Java and then assure – via an (expensive) process of acceptance testing and app customization – that the application ran on the phones they were selling (a list they continually update, and they’d probably require that the vendor provide free updates for new phones as a “cost” of getting the commission). Also, probably, the app vendor would have to staff the carrier’s customer care line to handle calls from customers having trouble with the application. Pragmatically speaking, this is a high-cost, low-profit model under which to develop software.

And as to your last sentence, such apps would NOT have existed if Apple had not changed the model to one that’s profitable. No constant worry about compatibility, no carrier acceptance, a well-established SDK and an open community of developers. Yes, Nokia tried this model in the early 2000’s. Apple’s just been fortunate enough to put all the pieces properly together – taking the carriers almost entirely out of the picture to the net effect that innovation has flourished.

Thanks for your comment!

But you make a good point, re: feature phone differentiation.

I don’t actually know enough about GSM carriers throughout the world. I presume there’s an India GSM and Africa GSM and so on — or off-shoots of Vodafone and Orange, or whatever.

They COULD bundle useful, developing-world-targeted apps with their phones, right? If those apps existed…

Tom E.
http://www.ringtonesmash.com/reviews/mobango/

I see Google as being in a great place to challenge the carriers – but they need to understand their value before they undertake that big mission.