Rca -- Engadget Mobile

rca posts

Rural carriers scoff at Verizon's exclusivity compromise

by Chris Ziegler posted Jul 22nd 2009 @ 8:53AM

After throwing rural carriers a bone last week -- seemingly in an effort to cool down federal investigations into anti-competitive behavior -- Verizon's not getting a lot of love back from the Rural Cellular Association, the group of some 100 or so of the country's smallest networks, which is saying that "the commitment does not go far enough to rectify the consumer and competitive harms caused by these agreements." The "commitment" the RCA's referring to is Verizon's promise to offer carriers with 500,000 or fewer subscribers access to Verizon-exclusive handsets after six months -- but for one thing, the offer apparently excludes products like the BlackBerry Storm, which you can imagine small carriers would have a keen interest in picking up as a hero device (with a decent firmware installed, naturally). The RCA also makes reference to the fact that about 180 million of the nation's wireless customers wouldn't see any benefit from the offer, presumably a shot at Verizon's 500,000-subscriber cap. The response from Big Red is flippant, to say the least -- "they don't need to accept the offer," says a spokesman -- so we wouldn't expect it to get any sweeter without a fight.

[Via Phone Scoop]

Rural wireless carriers file FCC petition opposing handset exclusivity

by Nilay Patel posted May 22nd 2008 @ 1:29PM

If you thought you were annoyed when one of the big wireless carriers locked up a phone you were after, you have no idea how frustrated small and rural wireless carriers are -- they've just filed a petition with FCC seeking to ban the practice. The 80 companies in the Rural Cellular Association serve small markets not well-covered by the big guys, like parts of New Mexico, Idaho, Kansas, Maine, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming, and they say that carrier exclusivity deals not affect their bottom line, but also deprive consumers of desirable phones like the iPhone and upcoming Blackberry Bold. They've actually got a pretty good point: lots of rural customers can't purchase and use an iPhone without technically breaking the AT&T service agreement. We'll see how this one goes -- although we'd love nothing more than to use any phone we wanted on any carrier, there are plenty of reasons it won't happen, and exclusivity is the easiest way for carriers to differentiate themselves to consumers.

3 teams up with Royal College of Art for phones of the future

by Chris Ziegler posted Feb 4th 2008 @ 11:01PM

When the mobile industry turns to college programs for design guidance, the results can be... shall we say, unusual. British carrier 3 recently enlisted the help of the Royal College of Art for a look at what phones of the future might look like and do, and needless to say, the results span the full gamut from mild to wild; on the mild side, for example, is the MÜ slider (pictured) that takes social networking to an extreme by showing all of the user's networks as points on a sphere -- totally realistic, totally believable, and probably destined for reality in the not-too-distant future. Moving to the wild end of the spectrum, the Auxo actually changes shape based on your profile. We don't see that one hitting shelves any time soon, but hey, keep on dreaming, guys.

[Via Shiny Shiny]