Why America isn’t entirely out of the mobile wilderness yet

Published by Ewan on Monday 15th June 2009, 11:55 View Comments | Filed under: Devices

I was just served this advertisement on the Daily Telegraph website, no less.

Congratulations to the advertising engine for correctly guessing that I might be interested in mobile technology. But for me, this doesn’t quite qualify as ‘mobile technology’.

‘Mobile archeology’, yes.

Here’s the add:

Dire, isn’t it.

Yes, this is a current T-Mobile USA advertisement. They are flogging at MOTOROKR. Seriously. This is no joke. It’s ‘free’. That’s no joke either. Free, provided you pony up a 2-year contract.

And guess what, people are still buying this rubbish, because it’s free.

The sad fact is that every single one of these purchasers is lost to the industry for 2-years whilst they pay off the contract.

You can feast your eyes on the handset’s “features” at this link. And marvel at the ’suggested retail price’ of $349.99 and the -$349.99 web-only discount.

Shame, shame and thrice shame upon you T-Mobile.

JebBrilliant

It's almost a crime against humanity that the US carriers are pushing this junk on the unknowing consumer. Telling them this is hi tech when it's tech my 2 1/2 year old daughter doesn't even want, she wants a better phone (then again she goes straight for the Amex card and cash when she gets into my wallet) but that aside, it's an insult to the buyer and only hurting the carriers. If they sold the consumer a grade A handset that had a decent web browser they would make money from them surfing the net. It's so old fashion of them not to be pushing web and just SMS and calls. Let's not forget that the carriers probably make more money off of SMS then anything else, I have no solid evidence to back that up at the moment but I remember reading on here how cheap SMS is for the carriers.

MarkW

That's actually horrifying.

Jonathan

even better is that AT&T will send me targeted Direct Mail as a customer with a similar crap offer. My last purchase was an iPhone 1 (though I use an E75 and 5800 now) and I use GB's of data regularly.

	YES!		9%
	No - boring!		91%

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