I have phone glee. It’s not the usual phone glee where I need the latest and greatest and coolest. Quite the reverse. My glee right now is to get my lovely bride’s iPhone 5S, get it unlocked, activate it on T-Mobile’s prepaid service and get myself 100 minutes a month of talk, unlimited texting and 5 GB of data for a slick $30 a month. I’d be giving away the larger screen and the NFC-based ApplePay on my current iPhone 6, but I’d also be able to pair it with the Apple Watch and pay that way – and I’d be getting a one-handed phone of a size that was just fine for two years.
To be honest, if you were on the original iPhone and managed to stay with the every-two-years pattern, you’re better off. The alternating pattern which I think of as the S-cycle was the first to get video capture, the first to get Siri, the first to get improved antennae and dual-LED flash and TouchID (and depending on who you believe, the first to get Force Touch and AMOLED). The integer cycle, which I had to get on when my original flaked out, was the 3G-4-5-6 which means you had to wait a year for all that stuff. You did get improved displays and new networks first, sort of (the 3G got 3G first, hence the name, and the 5 got LTE first, but the 4S was the first to get non-LTE 4G which was almost as good) and you got NFC for payments in the 6/6+ for what that’s worth, but the Apple Watch puts that payment on the iPhone 5/5s/5c and with improved displays came bigger size whose batteries didn’t necessarily translate into better battery life.
More and more, it seems like the smartphone reached the finish line in autumn 2013. The iPhone 5s added the dual-LED flash and TouchID; everything since has just been screen size and Apple Pay. Meanwhile, the original Moto X may well have been the perfect phone: assembled in America, with a power-sipping AMOLED display and 2 GB of RAM, and finally showing its full promise with the addition of Lollipop for battery management – plus the MotoMaker options made it the most personalized phone you could buy. I still wonder sometimes whether I wouldn’t rather have had the bamboo backing instead of the soft-touch woven-look polycarbonate. Sure, the phone wasn’t great, but you don’t buy an Android to replace your point-and-shoot camera.
And really, where have we gone from there? Phones that have crazy 1080p displays and go dead before dinnertime, phones with twice as many megapixels (which are half the size but who’s counting), phones with a camera that protrudes from the back or a display that wraps around one edge for no apparent reason, phones too big for your hand or too big for your pocket or too big for anything but a Birkin bag. Meanwhile, the actual gain in functionality has been basically nil.
And this is important, because it means that two years on, you can get the finish-line phone free on a contract (as is likely the case for the iPhone 5s come September) or for less than $200 unlocked (in the case of the brand-new third-generation Moto G, which is as close to the original Moto X as you can still buy now that the X itself is swelling to ridiculous proportions). Much like the PC, we’ve reached a point where the hardware technology is good enough for most people at a sufficiently low price point to be ubiquitous. Maybe you’re a power user who needs the very latest whiz bang cafeteria tray phone to do your secret squirrel bullshit, but Ed Earl Brown is just fine on his iPhone 5s.
This is kind of a big deal simply because it undermines the entire model of American mobile telephony. Time was, you only ever bought a phone on a 2-year contract because to buy it unsubsidized was outrageously expensive, and you had to have a contract for service anyway. Now, the phone companies are rushing to come up with no-contract models with payment plans for the phone, but if you go out and buy your own brand-new Moto G for $180, you can get that T-Mobile plan for $30 a month or get unlimited calling and text and 2.5 GB of data from Cricket for $35 or get something from Straight Talk or Simply Wireless for similar. For the first time, it’s become not only practical but actually profitable to separate the phone and the service. Three years ago, I took a phone from work because they had cut the subsidy for personal phones from $60 to $25 and I needed a new handset anyway to take advantage of LTE. Now, I could just take my existing Moto and that T-Mobile deal, ask for the work subsidy and wind up paying $5 out of pocket per month for my service. And at that point, it’s worth $5 to me to have my own phone and my own service instead of being at the mercy of my employer.
Plus, I could get that 703 number again. Of which…