You think his opinion has less merit because he got it for free? That is just laughable. Brad Feld has more credibility and money than you or I will probably have in our entire lifetime. Completely irrelevant.

By choosing AT&T, Apple chose GSM, which gave the iPhone compatibility with most of the world. They looked at CDMA and realized that it was a dead-end technology; they looked at the expense of having to maintain two different radio chipsets; they looked at a lot of things and made the decision that, at least up until now, they didn't want to deal with it. Apple has relationships with three GSM carriers in Canada (Rogers/Fido, Bell, and Telus) and many more elsewhere in the world. If T-Mobile had used the more common GSM frequencies, Apple might not have gone with an exclusive deal with AT&T. Maybe.

On the other hand, my immediate reaction on seeing the story title was "who is Brad Feld and why should I care that he's switching?"

Seriously. Looking at his CrunchBase profile, I can see that he does VC stuff now and built a fairly large consulting company, but I am still not sure that I should care about his opinions about consumer electronics. So I do think that his opinion has less merit because he got this particular device for free. (Money isn't credibility. To me, he's just some random guy with a platform. A blogger with no relevance to anything that I do.)

IMO, a consumer who has loyalty to a particular device or technology is a fool. If someone really comes up with something that I can unequivocally say is better than my iPhone, I will switch. So far, Android is "close but no cigar".

How much do you think it costs to buy a standard part, and hire a dozen engineers to get it all working??

My experience with embedded hardware type startups would lead me to think you would pretty much double your FCC registration process/expenses, add about 50% overhead to your QA budget to basically test everything twice, add about 20% to your hardware layout budget (unless the two chips are highly pin and form-factor compatible), and a few other incidentals. On top of the other extra basic engineering code to "get it all working".

Then of course you also have to WANT to have the unit on the carrier that you added the CDMA chipset for in the first place.

The harder part to gamble on in a situation like this is: how many people will switch carriers to get a truly hot device? If you get it right (as Apple has appeared to), a large majority of people will pick the phone over the carrier. I'm sure they would have sold more iPhones to date than the current number if they had a CDMA version, but I'm not convinced it would have been a truly significant number overall.

Anyway, that's my rough experience with hardware design. What's your perspective on the added costs?

Oh wait. They are? Huh. They must just have decided that the masses want iPhones. If they have to lose money on them... oh wait, you mean that isn't how business works?

The extra SKUs matter: if Apple is selling these phones directly (always a key part of their strategy, at least in the U.S.), how do they make sure that the customers buy the right one for their preferred carrier?

Training in carrier plans and pricing matters: How much training do they have to do with their employees about the different rate plans for different carriers? Configuring a CDMA phone on the cellular network is also more work than plugging in the correct SIM. The training differences involved are substantial and fundamentally against the way that Apple works: as simple as can possibly be done.

The quality of service/experience difference matters: would you care to explain to a customer why their buddy's iPhone on AT&T can browse the web while talking yet their "exact same iPhone" on Verizon can't?

There are lots of other extra costs that may or may not be covered by having a CDMA version that could reach a few million extra CDMA subscribers. Worldwide, there's ~142M CDMA EVDO subscribers as of 4Q 2009 (via cdg.org) and ~506M GSM 3G subscribers. The worldwide market for CDMA phones is ~500M, whereas the equivalent GSM one is ~4B. Apple made the right choice.

Here in Canada, Rogers's service doesn't suck (at least in the big cities), although their pricing sort of does (not enough competition). Bell and Telus switched to a shared GSM network (they're running both GSM/HSPA+ and CDMA until they can get enough of their customers switched to GSM phones to make it feasible to kill the older network). This was done mostly because they were preferred carrier for the Olympics this past year, and they didn't want all those Europeans roaming on the Rogers network, but it was done.

I personally predict that when Verizon has a major LTE rollout (which is essentially GSM), there will be a Verizon iPhone.

Yes, I currently am heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem with an iPod touch, iPhone, iMac, iPad, and a few other devices floating around.

Yes, I could be charitably called an Apple fan-boy at this point.

No, I won't stay with Apple if their build quality and/or experience quality goes down and someone has a viable alternative.

I don't have the money to throw around on lots of different devices, so I need to figure out what I'm going to buy that's going to last me 2 - 5 years (depending on the product and purpose). Right now, that's Apple.

When I'm ready to replace? We'll see then what the answer is. Five years ago, my answer wasn't Apple (it was leaning toward it, and the switch to Intel made it easier, but it wasn't there yet). Five years from now, my answer may or may not be Apple. It's up to Apple to convince me that they remain better than their competitors for me to stay.

Now, things are a lot harder. iPhone is still great, Android is doing really well, clearly catching up. Palm Webos is also good, and Windows Mobile 7 would probably be a worthy contender when it appears. BB is getting more consumer friendly, and Nokia have some great OS as well. Looking at Mobile OS, it seems you are right now, but in the past it was a lot easier.

/joke

Yes, I do think that. Giving away high-valued items for free to influential people at love-fests (nothing against the Google I/O event, but it's as much a marketing event as a tech-event) is a method used by all kinds of "luxury goods" manufacturers as a marketing/promotion scheme.

What's is Feld's credibility here? He's done some other things, so when he comes off a few days of events essentially designed to promote and highlight the device he just got for free I should follow his lead? Because he's made some VC investments? Sorry, but I think this post does more to destroy his credibility than build it. Maybe if he posted this after a full month of Android-only usage, or maybe if he also spent some characters describing what ISN'T so super duper great on the Android platform his post would have seemed far less fanboi and far more credible.

Apple had little clout at the time, and only ATT was willing to working with them. For now, they are still stuck with each other.

While Verizon/Spring may have better coverage in certain areas, they are complete dicks.

As a Sprint rep, I resent that. You may have had a bad experience with somebody on the phone, but to generalize all Sprint (or Verizon for that matter) employees as dicks is not appropriate.

I am talking about the control carriers used to exert on hardware manufacturers like Motorola, Nokia, etc... Whereas you could get the same device in Europe or the US, but the US version would be crippled because the carriers only wanted you to get ringtones from their store, wanted you to pay extra for bluetooth, and wanted an ad on the start page.

Which means you couldn't use Motorola software to backup your device, somtimes you couldn't run Java apps, and so many other problems.

I suggest it was Apple's iPhone which put an end to this madness, just as I said in my first comment.

Without iPhone, there would not be Android. Even if Google had still developed it, they would have had the same problem Apple had--phone companies not willing to let Google be in charge of the software.

It's only because Verizon and Sprint and the rest desperately needed something to compete with iPhone that they were willing to allow Android.

August 2005 is when apple bought the android OS form android Inc..way before iphone OS was even coded.

But I think the real question is what Android would have been without the iPhone, because even after the iPhone shipped, Android was looking rather a lot like a conventional smartphone OS.

Clearly there is a lot you don't know about human psychology. Try reading "Persuasion" by Robert Cialdini. Gifts, even trivial and unwanted gifts, make people feel obligation to the gift-giver.

Face it, whatever Android's merits, Google is leaving nothing to chance by buying a lot of good will with shipping containers worth of expensive gifts.

As for your rant about the AT&T relationship's cost to users: If Apple hadn't done that deal, what would the mobile device ecosystem look like today and how would that be for users? Before the iPhone, the carriers were so firmly in control, it was obscene. You think Apple's app store terms are draconian? Try getting in to one of the old mobile application stores. You think Google would have any leverage in the mobile space without the iPhone?

Look, AT&T sucks (not that my prior experience with Verizon was great), I'm reminded about that every day when 1/4 of my commute is plagued with slow-ass Internet even though I have a nice strong signal, but your cynicism is giving you selective blindness.

I'm reminded of all the "wintel" hate among Linux advocates a decade or so ago. There was a lot to hate, but without the economics of the Microsoft/Intel world, its pretty damn hard to imagine the cheap & powerful computing hardware that made an open source OS anything but a curiosity for academics and a small number of hobbyists.

No - iTunes is in a separate class of shittiness altogether.

1) The pragmatics of the platform means that iPhone == AT&T. You have to get both, so it's fair to box them together.

2) Mobile flash runs great on my Nokia N900. Even streaming full-screen video.

If so, that is great. I still don't miss Flash on my iPhone, and definately want to still keep on missing it.

Other browsers available on the platform might have different functionalities — in particular, the alpha/beta of Opera Mobile has click-to-Flash—like functionality.

When Verizon is on LTE, we'll probably see multiple iPhone carriers in the U.S.

What Froyo has that's great is over-the-air download & built-in intents-over-the-air (e.g., send a URL or a map to your phone, something I've longed for on the iPhone since forever; I guess someone should make an app for that plus a browser extension).

It'll be interesting to see if Apple can shift quickly enough in the two weeks before WWDC to address some of the remaining advantages that Android has over iPhone OS. I suspect not. They're known for establishing a course and pretty much following it inexorably.

An iPhone application has no way of having a long living listener for something that would resemble a push intent. The only thing you can do is register small bits of code as video/voip/audio services that can run in the background. Anything more advanced than that is reserved for Android or true multitasking OSes.

All hail Google?

In a year everyone will remember what a nightmare Google really is.

"Your cellular service sucks." "Yeah, but that's because we're locked in to a sucky provider."

"I can't tether through my phone." "Yeah, but that's because we're locked in to a sucky provider."

"Your desktop software sucks." "Yeah, but we think this other software sucks more."

I thought Apple was the one who figured all that matters in the end is user experience.

Excuse the crassness but bull shit. Apple chose AT&T. Apple committed to AT&T. AT&T today is as much a part of the iPhone as the display, the OS, the camera, anything. Indeed, more so, since Apple signed a 5 year, exclusive contract with AT&T and the hardware has changed and will change many times in that period.

If Apple signed an exclusive contract with some LCD manufacturer and was forced to deal with sub-quality displays nobody would cut them any slack. Apple made a choice in the design and implementation of the iPhone by choosing AT&T as an exclusive provider, they have to live with that choice.

This is an absolutely valid criticism of the iPhone.