Are my eyes really blue?

In a highly ironic and appropriate twist, Samsung has chosen Festivus – the day of the Airing of Grievances – to put out the word that Ice Cream Sandwich, the Android 4.0 release, will not be made available for the Samsung Galaxy S line, nor for the original (pre-Honeycomb) Galaxy Tab.  Why? According to Samsung’s statement as reported by The Verge, “The company’s argument is that they lack sufficient RAM and ROM to run the new OS alongside TouchWiz and other ‘experience-enhancing’ software.”

The Galaxy S first dropped in 2010, in March.  So with three months to go, the first adopters have officially been end-of-lifed on OS upgrades, because in a choice between the latest version of the OS and their own proprietary UI gimmick, Samsung has chosen the gimmick.

Say what you like about Apple, but when you buy an iPhone, you know (based on four years’ results so far) that you will get full upgrades to the OS for the life of the phone’s 2-year contract.  The original iPhone got the update to iOS 2 (inasmuch as its hardware could support it; obviously GPS and 3G didn’t come with) and the iPhone 3GS got updated to iOS 4 without a fight.  Beyond that, there’s even support for iOS 5, so if your iPhone is over two years old, you still get some of the new functionality.

This isn’t necessary.  Maybe in the early days of Android it made sense to slap your own UI on there, but Ice Cream Sandwich in its pure form (inasmuch as such can be had) is generally regarded as the best Android yet and doesn’t need to be tweaked up by OEMs.  Nevertheless, Samsung has made their call.  The real issues is that Samsung isn’t party to the notional Android upgrade agreement from a few months back…not that it helps, as that deal is allegedly for May 2001 and forward.  So if you bought your Android phone before this summer, it’s best to assume that you already have the newest version of the OS you’ll ever get.

Barring rooting and hacking, of course, and the usual suspects will sarcastically post compile commands and point out how open Android is so all you have to do is apply a custom build of the OS and you’re fine.  And the overwhelming non-geek majority of phone consumers will throw their hands in the air and line up for an iPhone, because at least you can be confident that you’ll get the full two years’ support for it.

Resolutions for 2011:

 

1) To take better care of my teeth and my hair, as I am running perilously short of both

Eh.  This sort of happened.  Needs to happen more.  Mainly I need to start flossing religiously and also put a better brush on the Sonicare.

 

2) To exercise beyond just letting the personal trainer torture me once a week

This kind of sort of happened but not really.  We quit the trainer after a while, but we did run a 5K on two separate occasions this year and did more regular walk/run work than has been done in ages.  I’m ticketed to join the Y after first of the year, both to facilitate cold-weather running (treadmill, aka the Horse Dyno, FTW) and to force me to do *some* weights.  The notion that I would exercise at work was a noble one, but logistically impossible to make happen regularly.

 

3) To make a better effort to find the free coffee on campus

Varying degrees of success.  Although one business unit I support did splash out for the Keurig this year.  More helpful was getting into the groove of filling the coffee thermos before heading out the door in the morning, something I intend to do more of in 2012.  Note to self: buy new GoodGrips 14 oz mug for Christmas.  Metal one.

 

4) To kick the white peppermint mocha addiction

Done.  Too sweet and too pricey.  An indulgence for Christmas only, and only because I’ve basically punted life until January 3. =)

 

5) This is a big one, maybe the biggest, because I haven’t made any real effort toward it that wasn’t tied in with trying to hide from dysfunctional relatives: I will unplug one night a week.

Done.  Amazingly, this actually happened.  There were times when I might cheat and glance at Twitter or look up the URL of a band while out, but almost across the board, Tuesday night in 2011 meant that the laptop stayed shut, the phone stayed on the bedside table, and I packed nothing more electronically capable than a MOTOFONE F3 and a Kindle with the wireless off.  I’ve done some reading, I’ve watched some TV, I’ve hung out with people, and I’ve basically taken advantage of the forced disconnect to help center myself and let go of the world for a bit.  This was the best resolution of the year and one that paid dividends in a big way.

 

Now, for 2012…we’ll see what I come up with.

Sic transit Newt. After a surprising second act in the GOP primary race, the ground seems to have opened up beneath the self-styled historian. A barrage of negative ads in Iowa has not helped the man who today got called a “fucking asshole” to his face by one irate camo-clad Hawkeye, and his inexplicable sabbatical (and ensuing desertion by almost the entire staff) have left him without the resources to fight beyond whatever free media he can scrape up – especially in the face of a conservative establishment rising as one to reject him.

Which is truly ironic. Because the modern GOP is the party of Newt. His plan to become Prime Minister of the United States was predicated on a Confederate takeover of the GOP – not just in terms of elected members of Congress, but in personality and campaign style. Redneck populism with a racial edge has been the Republican stock in trade for two decades now, and its origins – especially for the GOP as a Congressional entity – can be laid at the feet of Gingrich.

Like Frankenstein, though, his monster has run out from under him. The Tea Party now runs the GOP in the House, and it has forced the hand of John Boehner – as weak a Speaker as Gingrich was strong in the mid-90s – so that the House GOP is now on record as de facto rejecting a payroll tax break for ordinary working Americans that mustered a mere 89% support in the Senate. Because the most vital consideration for the modern GOP is to oppose – regardless of merit or consequence. The same scorched-earth approach that Gingrich brought to the table in the Clinton years is now the only way of doing business, and it has led to a Washington environment in which merely keeping the lights on is a Herculean task.

So it’s quite fitting that the future of the GOP has been perched on the Newt precipice these last couple of weeks. Sooner or later, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things you’ve done anymore, and that day is coming for the Republicans. Meanwhile, the odds are growing that Ron Paul may be the last man on the anyone-but-Romney-go-round, which may finally get him the airing his devotees have demanded for years now. Be careful what you wish for.

If nothing else, one thing stands out for Barack Obama: he has always had providential fortune in his choice of opponents.

 

Dec. 26, 2005…

Well that was interesting.

I’ve just gone through a time warp. I have spent the better part of the last five hours digging through a footlocker stuffed full of my old paperwork, from junior-high to the middle of Vanderbilt – in short, everything between “hey, girls are interesting” and “subscribe LISTSERV”. I generated two huge trash bags and most of a good-sized box, parsing into “keep this” and “trash that,” although half of the stuff to keep should probably actually be trashed. If any of you are Doctor Who fans, I think I may have just finished regenerating.

It’s a very surreal experience, knowing that all this stuff is at least ten years old and probably more like fifteen, but what’s more surreal is the way that I had that big needle-scratch in my mind when the wife came into the room and I realized that it wasn’t actually 1988, or 1993, or…

In high school, you always think you’re all alone, that you’re special and misunderstood and whatever. The really disappointing thing is realizing that you were just exactly like everybody else….

Dec. 27, 2005…

…the process of weeding out the cruft of half a life ago (literally, this coming spring, half a life ago) has done some really weird things to my psyche. All I can say is that I am clearly not the man I was, and not just the way that Christopher Eccleston is not Jon Pertwee. If you track back to 1988-90, I have gotten almost everything I ever wanted – granted, it took a hell of a long time, and a lot of what I got was not what I expected, and I have since lost some of what I got, and a couple of the things I just grew out of needing. But for better or worse, here I am. I don’t even have anything I wanted for Christmas and didn’t get.

God willing, maybe this means that some of my thought-processes and reflexes and instincts that were wet-wired back in the dark days of adolescence will go away now, or at least grow up. I’m not counting on it, though. I’d settle for just being able to make the mortgage on time and for my car lasting one more year…

There once was a time in the mid-90s when I watched Sportscenter with the obsessive daily fixation I’d had for the nightly news in junior high and high school.  Famously, I arrived for my second year of grad school to turn on the TV, set it for ESPN, flip to ESPN2, and proceed to go the whole term without touching any buttons but volume, mute, and previous-channel – including the power button.

Back then, ESPN was just making the leap into mass consciousness.  ABC still hadn’t quite been acquired by Disney (that came in 1996) and the whole “espn2” project was still seen as a bit fringe-y, and a lot of the personalities were the same ones who had been around for most of the 80s – happy hour with Charley Steiner and Robin Roberts, or the big show with Olbermann and Patrick (still one of the best television programs ever, never mind sportscasting or even newscasting).

The problem is that ESPN was too good at what it did.  It went from being the Worldwide Leader In Sports to the 800 lb gorilla, especially in areas where it was the predominant carrier of the sport – college.  ESPN made college basketball a national obsession in the 1980s and 90s because it was finally possible to see a lot of games with a lot of teams in a lot of areas – and they televised NIT and early-round NCAA action to boot.  ESPN showed four college games on Saturdays – usually more than you could see on all the over-the-air stations combined.  And ESPN’s influence grew out of all proportion once it essentially ate ABC Sports, heretofore the primary purveyor of college football in the fall.

Now, the track record speaks for itself.  Half a dozen channels, a magazine, a huge web presence, a string of restaurants for crying out loud – ESPN is too big for its britches.  It singlehandedly shattered the notion of bias against west coast teams when it pimped USC for three years as “possibly the greatest team of all time” when they won a total of one (1) national championship along the way.  It treated Brett Favre as bigger than the Green Bay Packers, beating the drum incessantly for him as The! Greatest! Toughest! Gunslinger! Quarterback! Ever! even when his last three teams finished their season with him throwing a pick that lost the game and eliminated them from postseason play. It essentially reduced major league baseball to the Yankees vs the Red Sox.  It enabled the greatest feat of NBA narcissism on record with “The Decision” and hyped the results to the stars with a year of the “Heat Index,” only for Lebron James to choke in the playoffs. And its latest project, Tim Tebow, the best-throwing wildcat fullback in the NFL today, got a whopping 88 mentions in one hour of Sportscenter last week.

Most important for our purposes, though, is the way ESPN precipitated the realignment of college sports with its operation of the Longhorn Network, giving a university its own private cable network for the first time ever (not even BYU, with its LDS-provided satellite coverage in years gone by, had 24-hour run of the service).  Its ownership stake in almost every minor bowl and broadcast rights for the BCS mean that it essentially controls college football’s postseason – indeed, it administers the coaches’ poll that is itself a third of the BCS calculation.  And most infamously, one of its on-air personalities essentially used the network as a platform to provoke the firing of his son’s college coach.  (At least it was a break from covering up the five hookers he killed at SMU back in the day.)

ESPN has essentially arrogated to itself the right not just to cover sports, but to order the pieces on the board to its own satisfaction and promote the ones of its choosing.  Not for nothing does it backbone the “SEC Network” that puts every single SEC football game on some ESPN outlet (even if Vanderbilt seems only to rate ESPN3 most weeks) when the SEC is looking at a sixth consecutive BCS football championship.

Maybe Fox Sports will make a dent with its half-dozen Pac-12 networks, the B1G network, and the electrifying tones of Gus Johnson.  Maybe the transition of Versus to the NBC Sports Network (in conjunction with NBCU’s Comcast SportsNet offerings) will enable a third party in the cable sports marketplace.  But right now, ESPN has a monopolistic level of influence on the world of college athletics, and the collegiate sports realm is the poorer for it.

I want to see this game in person before I die. It’s fitting that it gets pride of place as the last regular season game, because it is the apotheosis, the Platonic ideal, of what college football is: a bunch of guys playing their hearts out with no eye toward the NFL, all students and athletes with no redshirts or easy majors, in a rivalry that really will make the whole season worth it.

I haven’t had a lot to say about Cal football this year, because it’s been such a weird season.  Five stadiums in the first five games. Home games at AT&T Park, which is singularly unsuited for full-time football with one side of the stadium sending all its noise into the bay. A major shift in offense with the return of much of the old staff (we’re getting the band back together!) and the sea change in quarterbacking.  In short, this is a highly anomalous and outlying year for Cal football, and it’s felt strange from day one.

But to cap it all off, the gods of football have thrown one last wrench into the machine –  the bowl game.  Because the Pac-12 finally has two teams in the BCS, because the automatic bowl tie-ins were rearranged with the addition of the Alamo Bowl to the lineup, and because USC is ineligible for postseason play, the stars have somehow aligned to send Cal to San Diego for the Holiday Bowl, site of the infamous 2004 flameout.  And their opponent is none other than the team that effectively took their Rose Bowl berth: the Texas Longhorns.

To recap: Mack Brown basically attempted to beg the Longhorns into a BCS bowl, largely because his own job was in jeopardy after yet another loss to Oklahoma.  Enough writers and poll voters shifted their votes to put Texas at #4 in the BCS rankings and drop Cal to #5.  Because Utah – a non-BCS-conference team – came in at #6, the rules guaranteed them a BCS at-large berth, and because Texas was in the top 4 of the overall BCS rankings, the rules guaranteed them a BCS berth, and because USC was the champion of the Pac-10 and recipient of the automatic bid, that left Cal with no room at the inn, and that’s how the #4 team in both “human”* polls wound up in the Holiday Bowl against Texas Tech, who had themselves been bumped one spot up in the bowl system by the promotion of two Big-12 teams to the BCS bowls.**

And Cal lost.  The explanations are plentiful – some will point to the amazing power of Mike Leach’s infamous “Air Raid” offense and the 500+ yards of passing that night; others will point out how Cal was down to one starting receiver by December and yet still insisted on passing the ball to try to catch up quick through the second and third quarters.  My explanation has always been straightforward: Jeff Tedford is simply not the kind of coach who can rally a team from an emotional blow.  Look at the post-Big Game losses to Washington in 2009-10, or the slow collapse of 2007 – once the shoulders slump and the heads begin to hang, the odds that Tedford will rally the troops to fight back vary from slim to nonexistent.  And since the Holiday Bowl was the last place on Earth that the Golden Bears wanted to be, they played like it – with predictable results.

But for whatever reason, it happened. And Texas went on to a one-point win in the Rose Bowl followed by a national championship against USC in the very same Rose Bowl the following year.  Meanwhile, Aaron Rodgers turned pro, Nate Longshore had a season-ending injury in 2005 and a season-destroying injury in 2007, DeSean Jackson was ruled out of bounds against Arizona in 2006, USC payrolled their way to half a dozen consecutive Pac-10 titles and auto-BCS bids, and the Cal era finally crested in a Holiday Bowl obliteration of Texas A&M in 2006 and demolition of Tennessee in the 2007 opener before…well… with apologies to HST…

Strange memories to come on that nervous night in San Diego. Five years later? Seven? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. Cal football in the middle 2000s was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run …but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant …

History is hard to know, because of all the BCS bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole football program comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe a dozen evenings—or very late afternoons—when I left Memorial half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the Jetta across the Bay Bridge at twenty miles an hour wearing blue Oakleys and a a short-sleeve Cal rugby …booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of San Francisco, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too jittery to find the goddamn EZ-Pass in the glovebox) … but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where Golden Bear fans were just as crazy and excited as I was: No doubt at all about that …

There was madness in any direction, every week. If not in Berkeley, then up in Oregon or down 101 to Palo Alto or in Arizona …. You could get wins anywhere. (Except Los Angeles.) There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the excitement—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Bad History and Inevitability and the Pac-10. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our Bears would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave ….

So now, about five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Berkeley and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark —that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back…

 

As I alternately sulked and raged that night in San Diego, my wife told me “Well, now you’re officially a Cal fan.”  I had only come on board with Tedford in 2002, so I was there for the rocket ride up – but I think I knew at some level that we had lost something that doesn’t come around that often, something that may not come back around for a while – if ever.  And that explains why the rage has grown unabated ever since – not just that Cal didn’t get the chance, thanks to the perfidious trio of Mack Brown, Pete Carroll and the BCS, but that we don’t know if the next chance will ever even happen, let alone in our lifetimes.  And the magnitude of what was lost grows with every passing year.

* Well, the AP at least.  A sportswriter is kind of like a human.

** It has to be added that on top of everything else, a 3-loss Pitt squad was guaranteed a BCS berth thanks to the inexplicable decision that the Big East somehow rated an automatic bid.  Even if it were justifiable then, it’s absolutely risible now with five Big East football teams (including the aforementioned Pitt) having decamped for the ACC.  Conference titles are nice, but having a situation where a team like Pitt in 2004 or UConn in 2010 can somehow land a seat on the starship only makes me think that there shouldn’t be any automatic BCS berth for any conference winner and that the final top 10 teams should get the goodies irrespective of conference.  That would go over like a fart in church outside the SEC, although I suspect after the last decade Oregon might be on board…

I haven’t had the opportunity to do the “ride around listening to the Redskins” that much this year, largely because of a stereo-related issue that wound up forcing me onto XM and thus losing the Redskins’ broadcast for road games.  Home games only now, and with half the opportunities I wound up missing some weekends, and honestly my heart’s not in it because that team is godawful with few prospects for improving.

Nevertheless, Sunday morning at 10 found me pulling out of the garage with coffee to hand, tuned into the feed from DC, with Sonny and Sam doing their best Statler-and-Waldorf behind Larry Michael’s game attempt to keep the broadcast on track.  Time to go for a ride.

The ridearound had its origins in my senior year of high school, when I’d jump in the car and just start driving.  Gas was a dollar a gallon and Milo’s fries and tea were the perfect accompaniment to Eli Gold and Doug Layton calling Alabama football games on the AM radio, and it became a ritual to drive – sometimes as far south as I could, way down 280 to the far edge of the Birmingham sector, sometimes the long way up US 31 or 78, occasionally into the backwoods between Jefferson and Blount and Walker counties.  Fall colors through the sunroof, Gary Hollingsworth throwing to Prince Wimbley and no particular place to go.

By the time I got to Nashville, I could actually go to games, and the car didn’t have a sunroof, so the few ridearound moments were at odd times and for odd things – running between three different malls on a December night, 20 degrees and clear skies with a radio station out of Cleveland bringing in Cavs-Kings basketball or the outrage at the departure of the Browns.  Plus I actually had teams I could go see in person, so the radio wasn’t that big a deal.

And then came DC.  By 1999, I had brought back the classic ridearound – Burger King for a bacon double with two orders of fries and a huge Dr Pepper, with a possible bottle or two of Dr Pepper to refill with, and at least one cigar and sometimes two.  Then three and a half hours around the Beltway, down Connecticut or Mass Ave, maybe over Chain Bridge, through the highways and byways of northern Virginia.  And I got so stuck into it that I would spend Saturdays or offseason weekends wheeling around with Eddie Stubbs playing bluegrass on WAMU instead of ballgames.

The ridearound didn’t come to California until late in 2006, when the new Rabbit came with Sirius satellite radio – and thus NFL broadcasts.  Even then, the ridearound didn’t become a regular thing – we were away for a chunk of the 2007 season, and the discovery of Dan Brown’s Lounge pre-empted riding around a lot in 2008-10 before it was yanked out from under me halfway through last season.  And without the cigar excuse, there just wasn’t that much call to get in the car and drive to nowhere once gas broke the $3/gallon barrier.

Nevertheless, on Sunday, I saddled up and rode.  Mostly around the South Bay – down into San Jose, around downtown, back up the route of the light rail and down the various surface-level expressways.  I discovered a few things, like a Fresh ‘N Easy positioned right in front of the Fair Oaks VTA stop, or the fairly impressive-looking arena for Santa Clara University basketball (I need to stop in for the St Mary’s game, I think).  But mostly it was just the traditional stuff: light through orange leaves, burger and fries (In N Out, natch) and Washington’s traditional ignominious collapse in the fourth quarter (seriously 21 points given up in the last 5 minutes.  WTF) – and plenty time to relax and just drift along with the road.

* Festivus at last!  Nobody expected Festus Ezili to go 21 minutes last night in his first game of the year, but we needed every one of them to eke out a 4-point win over Davidson after blowing an 18-point lead in a span of six minutes down the stretch.  The book in Vandy basketball is this: hit them hard out of the gate so they play from behind, and don’t worry if they make a run; just go hard at them in the home stretch and you can dig it out.  It worked for Xavier, it worked for Louisville, and it damn near worked for the Wildcats.  We have to learn to finish games if we’re going to survive.

* My current iPhone plan is a legacy account from a previous employer which, to protect its identity, we will refer to as Grapefruit.  My plan includes 450 minutes a month, 5000 night/weekend minutes, unlimited data (no longer available with a new contract), 1000 texts a month for $10 (no longer available; it’s unlimited at $20 or nothing), and a sizeable discount for Grapefruit employees.  And right now, exclusive of taxes, fees, etc, my plan runs me $66 a month, of which $60 has been picked up by my current employer in exchange for using it as my work phone.

Out of curiosity, I tried to reconstruct this now.  Looking at sixteen months of data, I essentially never break the 400 minute mark or use more than 2 GB of data, and I’m not tethering – but I do need messaging.  And that package – 450 minutes, unlimited messages, 2 GB of data – now would set me back around $75 a month plus tag, tax and title, and the difference between Verizon and AT&T is less than $5 a month.  And that’s with the discount from my current employer.

As it stands, my reimbursement has been cut to $25 a month, so my out of pocket cost for my phone is going to be $41 plus the government.  The alternative is to take the work phone and possibly be billed for personal use at $15 a month, and then find myself without unlimited data or the cheaper text service if I leave (because I don’t go over 1000 texts a month at all).  I’m not surprised at this turn of events – since text messages go over the control channels, they’re essentially free to the carrier, whereas data is in demand and highly profitable in a world where people want to stream sitcoms to the phone.  But I’m keeping my phone for now.

* Looking at footwear again, I’m intrigued by the Australian work boot as exemplified by Blundstones – basically a Doc Marten-ized Chelsea boot, with the side elastic rather than laces.  Probably not distinct enough from my current footwear, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in something that didn’t have to lace.  Not just for air travel purposes either, which I’m grateful I’m not dealing with right now.

* In three days, Vanderbilt has sold 88% of its ticket allotment for the Liberty Bowl and has gone back to the bowl committee to ask for additional seats.  Now I kind of wish we were going, but I’m not cised to fly.  To Memphis.  On New Year’s Eve.  Kinda shady.

* ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: having my comments at Anchor of Gold quoted out of context by the Memphis Commercial-Appall [sic] with regard to the hiring of Coach James Franklin.  For the record, my remarks about “Do you want me to cry?  DO YOU WANT TO SEE ME CRY??” were directed at the prospect of Redskins coach Mike Shanahan suddenly becoming Vanderbilt’s coach, which is clearly obvious from looking at the page in question. People wonder why I disrespect American media, well, there you go.  So to Geoff Calkins: read, motherfucker.

* Once again, I am exploring alternative platforms for social media.  Right now, I am intrigued by how many iPhone apps are a world unto themselves, or the basis for one anyway: Instagram, Path, Glassboard, etc. -not to mention iMessage itself, or exotic location-based single-purpose things like Untappd.  Proof, if any were needed, why mobile companies would rather give you unlimited texts and soak you for data.  Or put another way: the price for 2 GB a month on the iPhone from AT&T or Verizon is 50% higher than the unlimited data plan when the first iPhone launched.

* My Buddy Vince Sez, “What is this Path you speak of, and does it lead to bourbon?”

Fin.

If the rumors are true, Friday will see the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus on Verizon – the long-awaited LTE-capable Google reference phone, running Ice Cream Sandwich on the most potent hardware ever.

Sort of.

See, Verizon has asked Google not to include Google Checkout on their Verizon-edition Galaxy Nexus, and Google is complying.  The jury seems to be out on how big an obstacle this is technically -and honestly, it should be pretty easy to circumvent – but the fact that it’s happening at all is the clincher: Android is no longer “open” in a way that is meaningful for the end-user.

The Nexus line is suppose to be the reference phone, the pure unadulterated Android experience. No carrier interference, no custom UI overlay, no un-removable apps, no screwing around with the prospects for upgrades.  If you get a Nexus, you get raw Android uninhibited by whatever provider you roll with.

Except that doesn’t work for Verizon, or any CDMA carrier for that matter.  With AT&T and T-Mobile (and smaller GSM providers, if any are left), you can always pull out an unlocked phone and pop your SIM in there, and boom, off to the races.  You may be limited depending on who the carrier is – if you’re on AT&T, you won’t be getting 3G service on the 1700 Mhz band on the Nexus S, for instance – but if you bought the phone, you can fire it up.  Not so with CDMA, where you have to call the carrier, provide the ESN and other codes, and hope they’ll allow it to be activated on their network.

Apple was able to work around this, because they could point to the success of the existing iPhone – with no carrier customization at all, with updates and software controlled by Apple rather than by AT&T – and tell Verizon, “Our way or the highway, and the highway is closed.”  Verizon got their custom apps – downloadable from the iTunes App Store if you wanted them, eminently delete-able if you decided they suck, and nowhere to be found when first taking the phone out of the box.  Every Verizon iPhone was able to update to iOS 5 on the day it shipped.  With the possible exception of folks just now buying the iPhone 3GS, nobody who buys an iPhone from a carrier has to wonder “will I be able to update this phone’s software in twelve months?”

Apple cut the carriers out of the loop.  The signature achievement of the “openness” of Android is to put the carrier back in control, and the fact that Verizon can dictate app placement on Google’s flagship device for 2012 is the final nail in the coffin.

The stink around “carrierIQ” is of a piece with this – carrierIQ being a Mountain View-based company who implements software at the most basic level of the phone for gathering metrics on usage.  Officially.  In practice, the carrierIQ layer is capable of everything up to and including keystroke monitoring, depending on how it’s implemented.  Its most basic form was used for the iPhone until recently.  It appears on almost every Sprint phone.  And all the hardware manufacturers are racing to point fingers and say “this is something the carrier installed, we have no idea what it is or how it got there, we swear!”

Nothing has changed.  Thanks to consolidation of carriers and the lack of a single standard, we now have a situation where there are four national carriers split between two incompatible technologies, and each technology has one carrier with two frequency bands and a carrier with only the one.  And only the interference of the FCC prevented GSM from all being consolidated as AT&T, eliminating the last option to move between two national carriers at will.  This might be affected when LTE is more widely deployed – but when the number of national carriers was a lawsuit away from being halved in the last six years, relying on a technological fix is a fool’s errand.

The carriers are running a tar pit.  Now, more than ever, you as a mobile technology user are at the mercy of what the cellular company is willing to allow, and your ability to move between them is more constrained than ever.  The result is essentially a monopoly effect – lock-in effect, increased costs, and less consumer choice.  How else did we get to a point where text messages went to 20 cents each – that is, until everyone locked in on unlimited text only for $20?  As late as 2005, incoming texts on AT&T wireless were free.  Now free incoming text is something wacky you only get in Europe.  Hell, if you don’t like your iPhone plan in England, you can go from Vodaphone to T-Mobile to 3 to Orange to O2 to God only knows who else in the MVNO field.  If you don’t like your service in the US, well, the unlocked iPhone only works with GSM – Verizon and Sprint won’t activate it, and T-Mobile can’t use the 3G bands, so you may as well just suck it up and go with a carrier-locked model.

Welcome to the tar pit.  it’s only getting deeper.