Nobody Likes ETFs, But Nobody Wants to Pay Full Retail, Either

Consumers don't like early termination fees. But neither do they like paying full price. A new Apple iPhone 4 with 32 GBytes of memory can be purchased now for $299 with a two-year contract, or at full retail for $699, without a contract.

Which option do you suspect most people will choose? If you want to know why the hated ETFs exist, it is the subsidy.

AT&T’s ETF on a smartphone like the iPhone is $325, up from $175 in May. Why? Some will carrier greed. But under the old pricing rules, a consumer could buy a phone for $99 on contract, instead of $600. Then the consumer could break the contract, pay the $175 fee, getting the device, without a contract commitment, for $274.

The customer then could sell the device on eBay or simply sign up for service with no contract.

Nobody likes contracts or ETFs. But nobody wants to pay full retail, either.

Digital Society � Blog Archive � Cellular Oligopoly is a Dirty Word

Right-Handed Users May Have Signal Reception Problems on iPhone 4

Most people now know that when using a mobile device, moving the antenna just several feet can sometimes change signal reception. Most people may not know that physical objects such as hands can interfere with signal reception.

It appears Apple's new iPhone 4 may suffer from that problem. Apparently, the iPhone 4 signal strength drops when a user grips the phone by the metal antenna band. Gizmodo has over a dozen videos of users showing off this problem.

When held in the left hand with our fingers touching the metal band, the bars representing signal strength dropped from 5 to 1 in less than a minute.

The problem appears to involve finger-contact on certain parts of the metal band.  When the phone is switched to the  right hand, which put our fingers in different position, the signal strength remained the same. So for many people, user experience may depend on whether they are left-handed or right-handed.

Right-handed people are going to tend to hold the device in the left hand, and navigate with the fingers of the right hand. That means most people are going to be prone to block the signal themselves, simply based on which hand they are using to hold the device.

And you might have thought mobile phone design was easy!

Only Issue: Will Apple Sell 1 Million iPhone 4 Devices Today?

The only issue is whether Apple will sell one million iPhone 4 devices today. A couple of obvious questions suggst themselves. Since all the early-adopter technophiles and even early majority users made their decisions long ago, Apple's sales now must come from the "typical" consumer.

Smartphone sales have been climbing for the past couple of years, so the issue is how much of the growth Apple is able to grab. The harder-to-answer question is whether Facetime, the videoconferencing app, which encourage families with widely-scattered members to get the device just for that feature.