AT&T Crippling BlackBerry for iPhone?

0xdeadbeef writes "BlackBerryCool got a tip that not only was AT&T removing GPS functionality from their version of the BlackBerry 8820, they're doing it so it won't show up the iPhone. While carriers crippling phones to stop them from competing with pay-per-use services is nothing new, this might be the first time they've done it to make their other products seem less diminished."

sigh...

[by Anonymous Coward]

The new AT&T feels alot like the old AT&T.

Re:sigh...

[DoraLives (622001)]

> The new AT&T feels alot like the old AT&T.

Trust me on this one ..... it's worse.

Re:sigh...

[PopeRatzo (965947)]

The new AT&T feels alot like the old AT&T.

I take your point, but there's something new in this type of behavior that we're seeing in all sorts of corporations. Instead of the traditional "free market" belief that "you give the customer what they want" and "supply and demand", there's a sense that we're the ones who are obliged to give the corporations what they want.

Let's face it, it's been some years now since consumers had anything like the power wielded by corporations. They pay the government and the government works for them. We, in turn, exist to give the corporations what they want, which is profits. Our desires don't enter into the equation.

The "free market", if it ever existed, is a deeply flawed concept. No matter how its done, the story always ends the same way. We are the consumables.

Re:

[foniksonik (573572)]

As a person who uses Apple products... I'd gladly purchase a non-Apple product if I could find one which was worth my money. I've tried buying other brands, non-brands, etc. and always end up with buyer's remorse... Apple just makes good products.

Regarding TFA... AT&T is free to do what they want with their products, though I don't understand why they'd choose this option. iPhone is a consumer product, Blackberry is a Business User product. They are targeted at two separate and distinct markets. Who car

Re:

[PopeRatzo (965947)]

But look at how readily Apple, now experiencing some measure of success, can ignore the desires of their own customers. Do you know how many consumers want to buy OSX to run on their own custom-built hardware?

How about how many iPod users want to be able to listen to FLAC files, or be able to use their iPods the way that they want them without violating the end user license. Speaking of end-user licenses, those are some of the best examples of the way the free market has betrayed consumers. Now, we buy a

Re:

[PopeRatzo (965947)]

Phone carriers are oligopolies. They price accordingly. It's not a free market -- legislators know that, the industry knows that, everyone seems to know that except slashdot readers. (Not a flame, its just true.)

Of course phone carriers are not free markets. But notice what those carriers start to cry when people ask for some assurance that access will remain open to these strategic resources: "We don't need Net Neutrality laws because The Free Market will sort out all the problems.

We're supposed to trus

Re:

[phreakincool (975248)]

Actually, that should be:
"The new at&t feels alot like the old AT&T."
They're smaller, but bolder.

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and AT&

[SimHacker (180785)]

A: AT&T

Yeah, I know: old joke. Used to be IBM instead of AT&T. But this story just proves it again! It's funny because it's true.

-Don

Q:What do you get when you cross NCR and AT&T?

[sethstorm (512897)]

Oh, the irony of those who've seen something too similar with NCR (before/after the trainwreck called AT&T GIS).

USA - rest of world

[spectrokid (660550)]

And in the mean time, in the rest of the world, crippled phones DON'T EXIST. Because the phone you use is independent from the carrier. Welcome to open standards (GSM).

Re:USA - rest of world

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

I've found you can find happiness in slavery.--Reznor

Re:USA - rest of world

[smitty_one_each (243267)]

Screw the furniture. Threaten not to use their products, and you've got their attention. Recall, there had been civilization prior to the advent of the cell phone...

um-- a bit backwords

[way2trivial (601132)]

people were MORE civilized prior to the advent of the cellphone.

Re:USA - rest of world

[Espectr0 (577637)]

It isn't pretty in all of the rest of the world either. In latin america, all phones are locked to the carrier that provides them. While they don't cripple the phones as much as verizon (my v3 came with all features enabled), we can't choose carriers. GSM doesn't mean that the phone is free from carrier lockdown.

Re:

[AFCArchvile (221494)]

Yup, exactly the reason why I bailed on Verizon. Their phones wouldn't do Bluetooth OBEX transfers unless you happened to get a specific phone with an "accidental" firmware revision where they forgot to lock down OBEX. Add to that the mandatory Verizon crippleware UI, which slows down the majority of the baseline phones and sometimes results in confusing menus.

I purchased an unlocked RIZR in December 06 and brought it to a T-Mobile store. They gladly ran the FCC number port on the Verizon number and acti

Re:USA - rest of world

[Actually, I do RTFA (1058596)]

I live in America. I have an uncrippled phone, because I opted to buy my own. I could either buy an uncrippled phone, or let the telco subsidize my purchase, but they want to cripple the phone so I would end up paying more money in the long term. Ultimately, I decided that to replace my uncrippled phone with one crippled in ways I didn't care about, but that was superior in other ways.

Let's be clear, you can bitch about the loss of rights companies force on you. Just be prepared to pay full-price for those things. Alternatively, you can buy a phone where they cripple the bluetooth, just use USB to move things, and say, "Hey, bluetooth isn't worth $150 to me to buy an uncrippled version."

It's actually more freedom in the US.

Re:

[Reaperducer (871695)]

And in the mean time, in the rest of the world, crippled phones DON'T EXIST. Because the phone you use is independent from the carrier. Welcome to open standards (GSM).

False.

Locked, subsidized, and crippled phones exist on a number of carriers in Europe and Asia. I've seen them in England, France, Belgium, Austria, and Japan.

You sound like someone who's been drinking too much Anti-U.S. Kool-Aid and has never shopped around for mobile phone service outside the United States.

And for the record, I h

Re:

[dunkelfalke (91624)]

there are four bands. gsm 900 and gsm 1800 are used in europe, gsm 850 and gsm 1900 are used in americas (because 900 mhz and 1800 mhz were already used in usa that time).

quad bands gsm cell phones work everywhere.

Re:

[Albanach (527650)]

No, GSM is not universally the same. There are at least 3 GSM bands (frequencies escape me). North America has one, Europe another, and (I think) the Middle East has the third.

The rest of the world uses 900 and 1800MHz for GSM. The US uses two different frequencies, 850 and 1900.

Most phones sold in the Europe are tri band or quad band these days, covering all the frequencies needed to roam internationally. I've happily been using various UK phones in the US since 2002, and roaming in Europe and Afr

Improved services attract consumers

[Technician (215283)]

Many carriers think they are a monopoly and don't want to have their low end rob the profit from the high end.

They are forgetting something. There is competition. They should strive to make all of their products and services more valuable to consumers.

Here is what we have so far..
1 An i-phone which is cool who's bill comes in a box shipped by UPS Oh and by the way is has a monopoly carrier.

2 A Blackberry. They are obtainable from several carriers, but AT&T cripples them worse than other carriers.

3 A Blackberry on another carrier.

4.. The rest of the market

If you avoid #1 due to the carrier issues and monster bills, you are now likely to avoid #2 for both the service and carrier reputation. Just what were they thinking? They don't hold a monopoly on Blackberries.

http://www.bbhub.com/2006/09/18/rating-the-major-b lackberry-carrier-retailers-who-gets-it-and/ [bbhub.com]

Re:

[NDPTAL85 (260093)]

The monster bills come with any phone on AT&T. And they don't equate to the cost of said bill. For example I got a iPhone bill that was 48 double sided pages long but all the charges were free and included in my plan.

Re:

[WPIDalamar (122110)]

"free" ... on an iPhone bill... cute

but...

[Midnight Thunder (17205)]

Many carriers think they are a monopoly and don't want to have their low end rob the profit from the high end.

There is indeed competition in some places and in others they just scare you from leaving with their high service termination fees.

Re:

[Opportunist (166417)]

This is nice and lovley until you realize that everyone cripples the service, so you have no choice.

I do not know if this is the case here, but the market goes that way. Why bother offering something when your competition doesn't offer it either? More importantly, when all the customer cares about is that he pays 0.01 cent less with you than with your competing company.

Look at the ads from the various cell providers. Does anyone mention his services? Or is all they push their "low" price?

Generally, you'll s

I'm not so sure why AT&T would want to do this

[intx13 (808988)]

I'm not so sure why AT&T would want to do this. Even though I wouldn't think that the iPhone and the Blackberry compete directly, at least prior to this decision AT&T sold one popular device with GPS functionality. Why they would change so that they now sell no devices (at the iPhone/Blackberry level) with GPS capabilities?

I could understand if Apple wanted this to happen... but how does this help AT&T? AT&T doesn't/shouldn't care if people are buying Blackberries over iPhones on the basis of GPS, so long as the Blackberry comes from AT&T. If they believed that GPS was the tipping point, those customers are now buying nothing from AT&T.

Doesn't seem so smart to me.

how retarted.

[Lumpy (12016)]

The GPS in every cellphone I have ever tried was incredibly crappy anyways. The Blackberry GPs's dont get a fix unless you carefully hold them up in the air in an open field, Nextel GPS phones also suck horribly. The iPhone dies not have a GPS for two very good reasons. 1. it's a metal casing phone. 2. GPS modules in phones simply do not work so they left it out. The cheapie Magellan Gold GPS I got for $89.00 on ebay kicks the crud out of every single GPS enabled phone I have ever seen. and yes I have seen lots of them. They can not get a GPS fix from inside your pocket or on your hip, they never work in newer cars as the glare film and other tratements make the windshield electrically conductive so it blocks RF signals.

I am sure they are disabling the GPS simply because the GPS sucks. The is the same company that 3 years ago refused to allow phones on it's network that did not have GPS's in them.

Re:

[gad_zuki! (70830)]

I dont think most cell phones have gps. They have "enhanced gps" or somesuch. They dont ever interact with gps satellites. They just know which cell tower they talked to and perhaps the nearby ones and do something like triangulation. Your cell phone knows the gps coords of the cell tower because the carrier does. So your phone asks "Hey Sprint, what is the gps of tower 581290?" Its not much more complicated than that, so the results are always going to be pretty poor compared to real gps.

Your magellan

Re:

[the unbeliever (201915)]

I don't know how verizon's vznavigator service works (actual GPS or tower triangulation), but it can get my current location within 10-20 feet when I allow it to locate me.

Re:

[Lumpy (12016)]

Incorrect, most cellphone Chipsets have GPS built in, even my crappy old nextel candybar phone had a real gps you fire up the program and watch it try over the next 20 minutes to get a lock on 3 or more sattelites. while the magellan has a lock on 6 of them in 1.5 minutes and has another 4 at full strength. The phone's app shows 5 birds only at less than 50% strength. The 3 different models of blackberry I owned all did the same thing incredibly poor GPS signal reception and are typically only 6-8 channe

Not precisely...

[Junta (36770)]

You are correct in that it isn't a pure GPS situation in most all phones, but it doesn't mean it isn't interacting with GPS satellite signals, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GPS [wikipedia.org]. GPS takes more time and is more picky about quality signal from satellites. aGPS still has some degree of satellite signal being received at the phone, but either sends that data to the tower which uses it's more optimal GPS situation to provide a lock, or receives the extra data from the tower. In other words, it isn't necessarily any less precise, just potentially dependent on communication with a tower and less time needed from the point of being turned on to being able to pinpoint the location.

Re:

[Amiga Lover (708890)]

Sounds like you just have a habit of buying shitty cellphones, probably just buying them based on looks. All 3 GPS-enabled cells I've used have worked fine, including in-pocket and in car.

Is this in any way surprising?

[owlnation (858981)]

I have to say that this seems normal behavior for any phone company the world over. I've never had the full features of any phone I've ever owned from many carriers in several countries.

It's what phone companies do. It's usually a question of finding the provider that sucks the least.

Although, in this case it seems a little back-to-front. I would guess that there may be users who end up with a Blackberry because they can't afford one, or their company prefers that system. I would seriously doubt there are many (non-corporation based) users who actually prefer a Blackberry now. Cost aside.

And, can I ask that maybe it's time to have a moratorium on iPhone stories. Yes, I think it's cool too -- but I am sick and tired reading of about it. The Firehose if clogged with iPhone stories. I want to read about something else now. Thanks.

Re:Is this in any way surprising?

[Oldsmobile (930596)]

This is infact not normal behaviour, I don't know where you got this from. In countries with functioning mobile phone markets (that would be almost everywhere else except the US) the customers will quickly abandon any company cripling their phones for another one.

Sure, that's exactly it. Yeah.

[jht (5006)]

As long as carriers dictate what phones do or don't do, this is no big deal - it's just typical. I suspect the GPS functionality lockdown has nothing to do with iPhone, it's probably just that AT&T wants to sell their Telenav service and make money from it. The iPhone really doesn't compete in the same segment as Blackberries of any stripe, and they sell at a non-subsidized price - GPS or the lack thereof isn't going to make a hell of a lot of difference in the Blackberry/iPhone purchase decision.

It's not like this is rare. Heck, Verizon's locked down the OBEX capabilities on most of their Bluetooth phones so they can sell their wireless sync service. Even Apple had to bite the bullet here - since there's no subsidy on the phone and Apple pockets all the money, don't you think they'd love to sell unlocked iPhones that would work on every GSM carrier? Or sell CDMA models through Verizon or Sprint? Of course they would. But to get AT&T to sell 'em and modify the network (build out EDGE capacity and add the Visual Voicemail system) they had to agree to a multi-year exclusivity deal.

So basically, the 8820 being modified because of Apple? I call BS. And if you want your Blackberry and you want it on AT&T, find yourself an unlocked version and just DIY. It's GSM, you can do that. It'll be unsubsidized, but at least that way it'll be a fair fight with the iPhone.

Wait - even though iPhone is unsubsidized it's still locked. Never mind!

Re:

[tjrw (22407)]

Precisely. I doubt that it has anything to do with the iPhone. AT&T has a track record of crippling phones that's almost as bad as Verizon's. If you want a perfect example compare the (crippled) Nokia E62 from Cingular, now AT&T, to the original version of the phone, the E61. Ooh look, no 3G, no Wifi, no SIP client. The only good thing they did was ditch the crappy proprietary Nokia connector and put a mini-usb connector on instead.

So, I have an E61 and am using it with T-Mobile (just swapped my SIM

Verizon too!

[dimer0 (461593)]

Comon, this isn't just AT&T. My *Verizon* 8830 phone has been "crippled" for about 2 weeks before the iPhone came out.

I called Verizon and inquired why my phone doesn't have the GPS turned on, and after getting to some 'data expert', I was told that the reason is Blackberry won't turn over some API or something to allow Verizon to enable this.

Now, I doubt that's really the reason, but again - this isn't some AT&T and/or Apple stunt.

No cellphone carrier understands BB customers

[T5 (308759)]

Blackberry won't turn over some API or something to allow Verizon to enable this.

That's about the fourth different reason I've heard as to why the GPS is disabled in the 8830, but the first to point the finger at RIM. First, I was told by someone at Verizon that only the 911 service used the GPS. Well, I had to explain to the customer service rep that the technology she was referencing was A-GPS [wikipedia.org], not true GPS like the Verizon marketing literature and the RIM website stated is in the 8830. The second person I spoke with a few days later swore that the GPS worked. The third person, b

Insult to their customers' common sense?....

[by Anonymous Coward]

...it sounds more like a Raspberry than a Blackberry to me!

Sorry :-(

What you have here ..

[ScrewMaster (602015)]

is a classic example of the FISS principle: Foot In Self Shoot.

Not the first time our communications carriers have done that, and I'm sure it won't be the last.

The New Antitrust?

[aldheorte (162967)]

I'm never one for government regulation, but in view of the very existence of these companies in this space being based on regulation (frequency band reservation), I wonder if we need new antitrust legislation for this, a situation that the original writers of antitrust law could not have readily envisioned or comprehended? It's sort of an inverse product tying and is definitely intended to decrease competition (for example, no one can offer a competing navigation product on this device even though it clearly has the capability).

Or perhaps we need to retroactively apply the Google points on open device access to existing as well as new bands? It can be done by Congress under the ethical directive of protecting the public commons. From a business standpoint, is a legitimate intervention when the existing leasholders of those commons are mismanaging it against the interest of overall economic activity and the public good.

iPhone is the benchmark?

[fermion (181285)]

At one time, like when the razr came out, people would just complain that the feature had been disabled so that ATT could charge for the service, or on a positive note, for security reasons. But now with the iPhone, and it's challenge to the safe designs, one has to say that Blackberry is so superior to the iPhone that ATT had to disable features to make the iPhone seem less lame.

Of course this ignores the fact that the phones are targeted to different people. The Blackberry is the corporate phone that

Summary is Wrong - RTFA

[HumanEmulator (1062440)]

The summary makes it sound like GPS is being removed from the phone, but the article says in first paragraph "...the US carrier has been successful in their attempts to lockdown the GPS functionality in their upcoming BlackBerry 8820 so that the only functioning 3rd party software will be TeleNav."

Not the same thing. "Only functioning 3rd party software", means you should be able to use TeleNav and any 1st party software (ie. whatever RIM has.)

Note: TMobile.com doesn't advertise (or even list as a feature) the GPS functionality on the BlackBerry 8800 that it is selling.

Of course there's no doubt this unbiased reporting from "BLACKBERRYCOOL" written by someone who admits to interviewing people while drunk (http://www.blackberrycool.com/2007/05/09/004387/) is totally accurate.

Re:Wow

[ushering05401 (1086795)]

Someone may be jumping the gun here. Wouldn't an AT&T/Telenav deal make more sense than an Apple/AT&T deal here?

I am going to hold off before taking a blogger's word that this move is iPhone related in the least. Telenav is now the exclusive 3rd party GPS app for the AT&T offering... follow the money.

Regards.

Re:Wow

[godawful (84526)]

I thought it was AT&T hindering the device not apple, so why do they need to be less paranoid?

Actually this all seems silly to me. Silly if true, I should say. I bought an iphone because I liked it, some other phone having gps isn't going to make me like it less.

Posted from my iPhone

Re:

[Nixoloco (675549)]

Apple need to get less paranoid.

You mean AT&T need to get less paranoid.

Re:Wow

[Mattintosh (758112)]

AT&T is upset because the vast majority of people don't want a crippled iPhone. They did costly upgrades to their network in order to lock people into crippled iPhone service in the US, and they honestly thought people would buy a crippled phone with overpriced, crippled service. Now that most of the hype has died down, and it's become clear that most people aren't as stupid as everyone likes to assume they are, they're attempting to make more demand for the iPhone by crippling everyone else's phones too.

There. Fixed that for you.

Re:iPhone is old tech

[OECD (639690)]

But this is old tech in fancy wrapping.

Don't fret, I'm sure it suffer the same fate that befell the iPod.

Re:

[djh101010 (656795)]

No 3rd party application availability?

What rock have you been under? 3rd party apps aren't a problem, doesn't even take a l33t haxx0r to install them. I've got apache webserver and a wiki running on mine, a Nintendo emulator (w00t! Haven't played Galaxians in years!), full shell access with ssh, and on and on.

I know it was delayed for long, and it sure looks like it. One year ago this phones feature set might have been more excusable.

OK sure, whatever. I went from a Palm Treo to the iPhone. Most of what the iphone does, the Palm does too. But without exception, the UI on the palm is clunky compared to how the iPhone does it. If you just want to check off

Re:Has Anyone Even Seen An iPhone?

[bwen (675669)]

I own one, my brother owns one, my mother has one, my father has one. My boss has one, my 2 best friends each have one. You can't go outside without seeing people using them. Its hardly a marketplace flop; initial sales projections were off, and they are selling quite nicely.

Re:

[Jaime2 (824950)]

So.... nearly everyone has one?

I have yet to see an iPhone in the wild. I work in IT with 20 geeks that have well paying jobs. I have a lot of gadget freaks in my family and there are many blackberries at family events. Yet somehow, none of them have iPhones.

BTW, my personal observations are just as representative as yours. That is to say, neither of our observation reflect the market penetration of the iPhone.