At a holiday party the other night, one of the hosts demonstrated some unofficial apps for his iPhone, which also apparently had greater roaming capabilities than most. Though he still rides on AT&T's network here, he can take the phone elsewhere and swap SIM cards and presto, he’s up and running in another country.
Speaking of other countries, Apple is rumored to be talking with carriers in Japan.
It’s the only way to fly; for those who want to fly faster, Apple reportedly will introduce a 3G phone sometime late next year. This is the subject of some debate, one of several currently under way about Apple products.
The particular phone in question won’t work on Verizon’s network, though – which is CDMA, for now. Verizon’s 4th Generation network will incorporate GSM technology, which means they will probably run parallel networks for some period of time, inasmuch as the company is able to support DSL and FiOS technologies.
Converged may be a fancy word for “all of the above” but it’s an easy point to overlook, in the sense that carriers have to support multiple technologies at the same time. Networks are not created overnight, and therefore incorporate legacy gear and services while also trying to add more capacity and capabilities to stay ahead of customer needs, which are constantly changing.
And perhaps changing at a faster pace than before: Verizon Wireless officials said as much during their conference call several weeks ago, citing the accelerating pace of innovation as a primary reason for their shift to embrace a new business model, which apparently will run parallel to their existing, subsidized phone business model, which most customers will probably stick with anyway.
But the domestic market's changing: the iPhone and the Blackberry have convinced some people that a good phone is worth something - I recall representatives from other mobile manufacturers being pleased with Apple around the time of the iPhone's introduction, because they (correctly, it seems) predicted it would raise the price point customers were willing to pay for a mobile device.
