It is likely that most of you have heard the term "SmartPhone" but don't really know what it means. You have seen geeky guys or hard-driven executives with Blackberry organizers. You have seen gimmicky commercials with celebrities showing off the designer multifunction phones. But to this day, it probably has not been explained to you. A "SmartPhone" is a device which combines the communications capabilities of a cellular telephone with the functional and organizational capabilities of a PDA. The leader in SmartPhones for many years has been Palm with a number of phones from Kyocera, Palm, and Samsung which attempted to squeeze a Palm Pilot into the general shape of a phone, with varying success.
About 4 years ago, I decided that I was tired of carrying around both my Palm IIIc and a cell phone. It was a nightmare keeping the address books in sync. It was uncomfortable having both cases at my waist when I travelled, so I tended to always leave either one or the other at home. Anyway, I started off with the Kyocera 6035, a black and white palm with a Verizon phone inside. It was not quite up to the power of my Palm IIIc, but then my Palm IIIc never let me surf the net from my desk! About a year and a half later, I was longing for more power and a color screen, so I upgraded to the pricey Kyocera 7135. The Kyo7135 was a much more powerful Palm squeezed into a flip-phone case and including PalmOS 4.1 and a SD Card slot for expandability. It also was capable of surfing the web on Verizon's more powerful Express Network. I gave the 7135 two years of use, and was only starting now to envy the expanded power and PalmOS 5+ capabilities of the new Palm Treo 600 and 650.
But now suddenly after 5 years of happy SmartPhoning on Verizon, I find myself giving up both the PalmOS and Verizon for T-Mobile's Sidekick II. I find myself asking why, since I was in no way unhappy with either. The answer, unsurprisingly, is money and functionality. Both Palm and Verizon have been quite unashamed about how they are choosing to maximize profits. When I joined Verizon, it was possible to get a $20 plan for your personal use which more than met my modest needs. Now, their minimum plan is $40 and their cheapest reasonable data plan is $45. That means I was paying almost $100 bucks (with taxes) per month for a cell phone that I was pretty much only using for the data features. At the same time, Palm continued to charge a premium for their newest SmartPhones. To upgrade to a SmartPhone that I could use on the Verizon system, I would have to pay $600. To buy one with a new plan on another system would cost me a minimum of $400. And that is not for the newest or the best one around.
Enter T-Mobile. The T-Mobile Sidekick retained all of the most important functionality of a SmartPhone: Address Book, Calendar, Games, and Internet Connectivity. It was better at the two major data functions I used every day - surfing the web and sending e-mail. (My work tightly controls access to both to workers, in order to keep viruses off the network.) And the price was better. Instead of over $100 a month, I am paying under $60. And despite a slightly lesser national network, I have more than adequate coverage everywhere I travel.
What is the lesson here? Apple made the iPod great by starting high and then bringing it down to be affordable to most users. But Palm is starting high and then raising it higher. Verizon is doing the same. Time to start learning from success, and stop thinking only about the next quarter of profits.
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