6 ms·

Carriers seem to be the problem here. That CM dev is moving to Sony, but I'm having the same crap over there. My Xperia U is still running Gingerbread even thou

Carriers seem to be the problem here. That CM dev is moving to Sony, but I'm having the same crap over there. My Xperia U is still running Gingerbread even though Sony released ICS for that device 4 months ago (and the bootloader is locked by my carrier). Why carriers get to choose what OS runs on my phone is beyond me. My ISP doesn't get to decide which OS I run on my computers, I don't see why this would apply for cell phone carriers.

w1ntermute 14y ago
Carriers are totally the problem. Yesterday, Vizio announced two phones running stock Android (Jelly Bean) at CES. They look gorgeous, and The Verge staff, which has had hands-on time with them, says they're amazing. They would use these phones as their daily drivers. But these phones aren't being released in America - they're being released in China. Why? Because the American carriers won't play ball (because the phones run stock Android), so they're forced to take their product overseas. In China, you can just buy a phone, put a SIM card in it, and you're off to the races. Think about that for a second. A rare American hardware upstart success story is forced to sell its first phones in China because American carriers won't accept them.
- contingencies 14y ago
  I agree except that when you say "in China", what you actually mean is "in most of the world". You see, when we have less hegemonic mobile network operators (due basically to their inability to hunt down and nail people who reneg on long term phone contracts), we have a more heterogeneous system. In the end, everyone benefits. What we need is less authority, more internet. Hopefully GSM will die soon and we can all use some kind of public, tor-rerouted, bandwidth-metered cryptophones over wifi. I'm sure the NSA will love that.
  - Camillo 14y ago
    Surely you mean "CDMA will die soon". That's the American technology behind the American idea of "this phone belongs to this carrier". The carrier decoupling that you see in Europe and elsewhere was enabled by GSM-family technologies (GSM, UMTS, LTE) and their use of SIM cards.
    - gte910h 14y ago
      American GSM carriers lock the phones too.
      - detst 14y ago
        Right but the root problem is that I can't take my Verizon phone to AT&T because of hardware incompatibility. There's not much sense in fighting for something that is largely irrelevant to most people.
        gte910h 14y ago
        Ahh, I actually hadn't realized Android was largely using two versions instead of putting the double radio chips in that handle both.
        contingencies 14y ago
        I believe there is a separate baseband firmware (drives radio chip) to the system firmware (Android; drives UI and operating system). My impression is that, in normal cases, the former is loaded in the factory and is never altered, and Android applications essentially view the network through a cellular-protocol-agnostic API.
- digikata 14y ago
  So what's the key difference in the operating environments of mobile carriers in China (and much of the rest of the world), where choice of handset seems to be fairly decoupled from access to the network?
  - Someone 14y ago
    For Europe, I think it was having lots of relatively small countries. That led to lots of national phone companies which had a monopoly in their country. To facilitate international calls, they had to cooperate. When wireless networks started, none of them could build a network covering significant parts of Europe. Again, they (eventually; there were some early networks that were incompatible with each other) had to cooperate. Next/somewhat in parallel, the EU forced national phone companies to be privatized and allow competition. The net result is GSM, where companies share their networks, and subscriptions are tied to SIM cards. For China, I guess they just made the right choice, looking at the USA and Europe as options.
  - contingencies 14y ago
    A few differences that come to mind: 1. Chinese carriers are all government-run, basically. There's basically two: China Unicom and China Mobile. Almost everyone used to use the latter, but Unicom is getting better recently (last few years). It takes a lot of effort to follow though, so I'm not 100% on all that (I'm back to China for Chinese new year in a couple of weeks, living in Thailand now!) 2. Nearly everyone uses prepay. 3. Most people aren't living in debt. 4. There is a massive market for cheap and/or stolen phones. 5. A not insignificant number of phones, particularly at the luxury end, are 're-routed' from the Hong Kong 'export' market back in to the mainland. 6. Chinese save a lot of money and don't tend to live beyond their means as much as Americans. 7. The entire mobile infrastructure is generally less than ten years old. 8. The Chinese produce their own infrastructure hardware (chiefly Huawei). 9. The Chinese government wisely sees infrastructure as a political and security tool, and so probably subsidises it in many ways. (This also goes for roads, electricity, etc.) 10. Coverage is far better than the US. You almost never have no coverage, even waaaay out in the hills. And in 10 or so years, I've never had a dropped call.
rayiner 14y ago
Because cell networks aren't like the public Internet.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
bdcravens 14y ago
I knew what to expect when I turned my Galaxy S3 for the first time and saw the AT&T logo pop up. (Let's not get into the bloatware installed)
matt_heimer 14y ago
The reason they get to choose is because you let them. Stop buying subsidized phones that come with multi-year contracts. They use the device to bait you into the contract, once they've got you they have no reason to try to improve the device in any way.

w1ntermute 14y ago

Carriers are totally the problem. Yesterday, Vizio announced two phones running stock Android (Jelly Bean) at CES. They look gorgeous, and The Verge staff, which has had hands-on time with them, says they're amazing. They would use these phones as their daily drivers. But these phones aren't being released in America - they're being released in China. Why? Because the American carriers won't play ball (because the phones run stock Android), so they're forced to take their product overseas. In China, you can just buy a phone, put a SIM card in it, and you're off to the races. Think about that for a second. A rare American hardware upstart success story is forced to sell its first phones in China because American carriers won't accept them.

contingencies 14y ago
I agree except that when you say "in China", what you actually mean is "in most of the world". You see, when we have less hegemonic mobile network operators (due basically to their inability to hunt down and nail people who reneg on long term phone contracts), we have a more heterogeneous system. In the end, everyone benefits. What we need is less authority, more internet. Hopefully GSM will die soon and we can all use some kind of public, tor-rerouted, bandwidth-metered cryptophones over wifi. I'm sure the NSA will love that.
- Camillo 14y ago
  Surely you mean "CDMA will die soon". That's the American technology behind the American idea of "this phone belongs to this carrier". The carrier decoupling that you see in Europe and elsewhere was enabled by GSM-family technologies (GSM, UMTS, LTE) and their use of SIM cards.
  - gte910h 14y ago
    American GSM carriers lock the phones too.
    - detst 14y ago
      Right but the root problem is that I can't take my Verizon phone to AT&T because of hardware incompatibility. There's not much sense in fighting for something that is largely irrelevant to most people.
      - gte910h 14y ago
        Ahh, I actually hadn't realized Android was largely using two versions instead of putting the double radio chips in that handle both.
        contingencies 14y ago
        I believe there is a separate baseband firmware (drives radio chip) to the system firmware (Android; drives UI and operating system). My impression is that, in normal cases, the former is loaded in the factory and is never altered, and Android applications essentially view the network through a cellular-protocol-agnostic API.
digikata 14y ago
So what's the key difference in the operating environments of mobile carriers in China (and much of the rest of the world), where choice of handset seems to be fairly decoupled from access to the network?
- Someone 14y ago
  For Europe, I think it was having lots of relatively small countries. That led to lots of national phone companies which had a monopoly in their country. To facilitate international calls, they had to cooperate. When wireless networks started, none of them could build a network covering significant parts of Europe. Again, they (eventually; there were some early networks that were incompatible with each other) had to cooperate. Next/somewhat in parallel, the EU forced national phone companies to be privatized and allow competition. The net result is GSM, where companies share their networks, and subscriptions are tied to SIM cards. For China, I guess they just made the right choice, looking at the USA and Europe as options.
- contingencies 14y ago
  A few differences that come to mind: 1. Chinese carriers are all government-run, basically. There's basically two: China Unicom and China Mobile. Almost everyone used to use the latter, but Unicom is getting better recently (last few years). It takes a lot of effort to follow though, so I'm not 100% on all that (I'm back to China for Chinese new year in a couple of weeks, living in Thailand now!) 2. Nearly everyone uses prepay. 3. Most people aren't living in debt. 4. There is a massive market for cheap and/or stolen phones. 5. A not insignificant number of phones, particularly at the luxury end, are 're-routed' from the Hong Kong 'export' market back in to the mainland. 6. Chinese save a lot of money and don't tend to live beyond their means as much as Americans. 7. The entire mobile infrastructure is generally less than ten years old. 8. The Chinese produce their own infrastructure hardware (chiefly Huawei). 9. The Chinese government wisely sees infrastructure as a political and security tool, and so probably subsidises it in many ways. (This also goes for roads, electricity, etc.) 10. Coverage is far better than the US. You almost never have no coverage, even waaaay out in the hills. And in 10 or so years, I've never had a dropped call.

rayiner 14y ago

Because cell networks aren't like the public Internet.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

bdcravens 14y ago

I knew what to expect when I turned my Galaxy S3 for the first time and saw the AT&T logo pop up. (Let's not get into the bloatware installed)

matt_heimer 14y ago

The reason they get to choose is because you let them. Stop buying subsidized phones that come with multi-year contracts. They use the device to bait you into the contract, once they've got you they have no reason to try to improve the device in any way.