Are smartphones getting too pricey?
 

Hi,

The big hoopla this month was the samsung galaxy S4 and the HTC One both are excellent phones and I wish I could afford either one of them. But I always buy unlocked phones because that's me.

Anyway both unlocked versions range from $700 and up. That is way too pricey. For that price you can buy a intel core i3 or i5 laptop. Does Android and it's apps need that much power to run (i.e quad core 1.6-1.9 GHz processors....)

I'm not complaining, I'm just babble with the high price and high power these smartphones are getting and they're costing more than laptops.

But that's technology and the high cost of it. :)

I'm going to wait awhile and hope the galaxy S4 drops in price. The reviews on the S4 kicks A$$.

I would like a new one having a physical sliding keyboard or similar to motorola's q10, but on the market there are 1000 similar touch-models and only 2 oldish ones having a physical keyboard :(
don't understand why no company is trying to differentiate itself a bit... .

It's a matter of opinion/philosophy I guess.

For some people, their phone is a mobile office.

To me, a phone is a phone. While it is very nice to have all of the smartphone features, the main reason I carry it is for phone calls and SMS. The one I have is a Samsung Galaxy Ace, which is almost the bottom of the range now. Even though it is a low-end unit, it is still more powerful than the computer I was using for work <15 years ago. (it is great! I have ScummVM running on it... :) ).

The 'outright' prices of high end phones haven't changed terribly much over the past few decades. In fact, if anything, they've dropped, especially if you factor in CPI.

Yeah. That sort of money buys a very good laptop around here. You can certainly buy an i3 powered unit for much less.
Android is a very much 'cut down' Linux distro. It doesn't take that much horsepower to run it, but faster hardware is always a good thing, isn't it? :) The S3 boots in seconds. My Galaxy Ace takes a good minute before everything is loaded, but I don't really care. It is just a phone, after all.

I have a feeling that in 6 to 12 months you'll be able to buy an S4 for significantly less than the current price. Maybe even sooner. Give it a few months and then start scoping ebay... but exercise caution!

I would never pay that for a smartphone. EVER. I am also plenty happy using a $50 rooted LG Optimus Slider with no contract. I can use juicessh to run tasks on my workstations, check news, weather, email, use google drive, stream pandora, etc. It may be a tad slow compared to what is new these days, but hell, it does everything I need it to.

I get unlimited data and text for $27 a month with Virgin Mobile(No contract) and only paid $50 for a phone that has a physical keyboard. I couldn't be more happy. I might break down and get a faster phone someday, but I'm happy with the one I have now, and I'm not going to get overly emotional if I happen to drop it and it breaks.

Depends on the quality and facilities.The cost is differ.The phone is very expensive the quality is good.

Unlocked smartphones have always been pricy because the phone companies aren't subsidizing them. Even the first iPhone was something like $500 with a contract. The bigger problem with smartphones is that most of them have a very short support window. The Android phones aren't too bad since the platform tries to achieve backwards compatibility, but there's no supported way of upgrading them.

No, they are priced correctly. We are getting poorer.

I knew some people at IBM that bought an original PC at employee prices to the tune of $4K in 1989 dollars.

Nice thing about HTC is they'll help you unlock your own phone http://www.htcdev.com/ at your own risk, of course.

I miss coin-operated pay phones. They used to be ubiquitous, and cheap. They were anonymous, and they had no location-tracking features. It is rare to find one these days. They've just about all disappeared.

And congress mandated to "Ma Bell" that the phone network MUST survive a nuke exchange and still WORK

after the cat 5 hurricane ripped through New Orleans the only working phones WERE the old pay phones .The ones that had to still work after a limited exchange with the soviet union .

I am that guy you have all heard about who does not now and never will own a mobile phone.

I had one of the old bricks about 1988 - it went out the car window over a bridge, along with a pager, and my life changed in that single act of rage. I did not ever regret it, not for a second. ;)

Unfortunately, those are now pretty much non-existent and not very useful when you find one. About a year ago I was delayed returning home late one night and decided to call because I was expected. I found a pay phone which would not allow me to use the valid phone card I carried. With no other options I decided on a quick collect call (same area code, about 25 miles away, how much could it be?)... $27 for 3 minutes! So I just avoid them now even when I find one, but still not enough motivation for me to carry a mobile phone.

Regrets? I've had a few, but none about not joining the mobile crowd!

I want to know how they can get away with charging extra for "tethering." They cripple the built-in WiFi hotspot and then charge you for re-enabling it! What a racket!

To the old farts: I tried blowing my Captain Crunch whistle into it but nothing happened. :D

Tethering is a service they don't have to provide at all. When it's utilized, it increases bandwidth consumption on their networks, which they must provision for. It seems perfectly reasonable that they would charge for it.

I did the math on Txt message pricing once. Ill paraphrase what I came up with back then:

One second of talking on a phone is 32kb of data. If you talk on your phone for the average time of 16hrs per month, you get:

(32 (kb / s)) * 16 hours =
1.7578125 gigabytes

A text message is 1024 bytes (140 of it text, the rest header info) and costs 10 cents on limited plans. So each 1kb is 10 cents.

So, if the phone company charged you the same for talking (which is just data), as they do texts (which is just data) your phone bill would be, per month:

$183,500 dollars

If you talk for 8 Seconds, you have effectively sent 250 text messages. So, why charge for them? Because they are evil.

Also, here is a link to someone who figured out that at the cost of text messages, if he sent 2500 songs through text messages, it would cost, $65,000,000 dollars.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/91379

So, yeah. Phone companies are there to make money, as much money as they can. And they are very good at it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...ies_by_revenue

They are the 35th largest grossing company,.. in the world.

Why would it increase bandwidth consumption? Didn't make my 3G phone any faster. All it did was bridge 3G to WiFi NICs. Whether I'm surfing LinuxQuestions from my Andoid's browser or from my PC's browser the bandwidth consumption is the same.