Actually Apple IS selling unlocked iPhones in Australasia from both their b&M and online stores and they're still selling like hotcakes. As of last week, the Apple Stores (retail) in hongkong and australia couldn't keep their stocks in longer than a day or two after replenishment and online orders have 2-3 weeks lead time.

But, these are markets that are already used to buying full priced phones without subsidies. With the iPhone 3GS prices of $750 (16GB) and $850 (32GB), I doubt they'd make any significant dents to the US cellular cartels if they were sold unlocked.


@tso: ipod nano -> iphone nano?

Yeah and look how Apple went from being the leader in computers to falling to IBM and Microsoft during the computer revolution. But Apple tends not to care about being the leader in marketshare it seems. So if they're content with keeping a smaller marketshare and making high premiums off of that then it's a strategy that works for them.

technically, ibm was hoping to tie the PC to them by making the bios inhouse while the rest where commodity parts.

but then a taiwanese company reverse engineered the bios, got a green light from the courts, and microsoft had a open agreement with ibm.

all in all, one could shop PC's as a commodity, and expect them to run the same software as the last one, thanks to them all running microsoft dos, and later windows, out of the box.

hell, one can run much of the old dos software on a modern windows machine. I think i have seen shops use dos based inventory control packages thats not been replaced since they opened for business.

True, I was being simple with the story of how PCs opened up. The truth of the matter is as you pointed out. It dealt with court cases, and Microsoft's open agreement with IBM that let them put their OS in nearly anything.

But anyway that's what I think is going happen with the smartphone market eventually. That a more open (not necessarily open as in code like Linux) but open as in plentiful is going outnumber companes who insist on having only one model or be tied to one manufacturer/carrier. Who that competitor is, I don't know. Though right now out of the existing operating systems I'm thinking it'll be Android (But even then Android is still premature at the moment and Google seems to be slow).

I don't agree.

I think Google is providing a "least common denominator"/"reference platform" for Android, and then leaving the bells and whistles to the specific vendors. That's what's going on with both the Samsung and HTC Hero, it seems like.

And, that Google "vanilla Andriod" doesn't seem immature to me. It doesn't have a lot of frills, but it has what it needs. And it does expand over time. The immature phase were those first 3 months when we found out every key stroke was being sent to a root shell, under the hood... and things like that.

What seems immature in the Android arena is: the app ecosystem is still growing from its initial offerings into a more rich environment, and the add-on vendors (HTC, Samsung, Motorola) are still emerging. But neither of those is Android itself. I could, frankly, be quite happy with my G1, running Vanilla Android, for quite some time. Its limitations aren't due to lack of maturity, but lack of common goals (I want tethering, T-Mobile doesn't want me to have tethering; that kind of thing).