Why There's No SMS In The US
from the is-that-so-bad? dept
Simson Garfinkel is usually better at coming up with at least somewhat original ideas than this. His latest column for MIT's Tech Review is a complete rehashing of what people have been saying for the past few years - with almost nothing new to add. While SMS text messaging is popular around the world, it hasn't caught on in the US because we have all these different standards and you can't communicate across carriers. He even goes so far as to suggest that the government might want to step in and force standards on the carriers. How quickly things change. That sounds like the arguments people were making about HDTV and other things a decade ago, when everyone was afraid that Japan's somewhat planned economy was going to destroy the US's. It turns out that Japan's economy didn't work out so well, and it actually helped the US to be a bit late to the party. So, sure, we might not have real SMS that makes everyone happy yet... but I'm not too worried about it.
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sms *and* imode suck...
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Re: sms *and* imode suck...
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Re: sms *and* imode suck...
i-mode
SMS
WAP
As someone who's used all three, I know. If richochet/metricom had gotten their shit together and miniaturized their tranceivers to the point where they could be put in a cell phone or on a compact flash, they they would have sucked the least... but alas, they just didn't understand the importance of their particular niche in the US wireless market (stupid fools).
Now we're stuck with morons considering using 802.11 in cell phones... and that, my friends, will suck worse that any of the above technologies.
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