My dad is currently shopping around for a new cell phone since he’s just about ready to throw his current one against a wall, which brings me to my point here. There are a whole lot of junky cell phones out there. That’s not to say there aren’t any great ones in the mix as well. I love my iPhone, and there are those like the Nokia N95 that have won much respect as well. It just seems to be when you get down into the lower end that you discover the muck. Yes, I know it’s called the low end for a reason and that I shouldn’t expect them to be as good as the one’s you actually pay a good amount for, but all the same I have watched the overall quality of the "free" phones degrade a significant amount over the years.
For the most part, my family has always just gotten the "free" phones, we didn’t need more (until I became a gadget-head anyway) but in this past generation of two we have moved on up into the "$20" range. Not much different but there were just no free phones that were of any real quality. Instead of making a call like they’re supposed to, they would break without warning and without any real cause. The old free phones didn’t do that. They were decent phones. What has happened to the tradition. The model is supposed to work in a way that lets the subscription pay for a decent phone over time without making the customer pay a ridiculous amount for a simple phone, but now it seems like they practically are giving you a free phone and getting all of that subscription money for themselves. Now it’s even getting to the point that the ones with the smaller premiums aren’t even worth getting. You have to pay even $100 sometimes just to get a device of desirable quality even if you don’t need the extra features.
I suppose I can understand why this is. It makes since for the companies the make their giveaways not-so-good so people will pay those premiums, but that doesn’t make it right (like oh so many other things in business). If they are going to have a model to try and provide a phone for the people who don’t want to pay for extra features, the model needs to work and actually provide a phone, not a sorry excuse for one. I suppose I will probably just always have the upper end of the spectrum in phones since I am such a gadget-head, but it still upsets me that one of the world’s biggest industries has degraded to the level that it has (I can’t speak for the European and Asian markets in this, supposedly they are better, but that’s the American situation).
