September 14, 2004 03:40 PM

Broken: Verizon's support of v710 phone

Ilya Goldin and Paul Schreiber point out the brokenness of Verizon's new phone, the Motorola v710: Seems that the v710 had a great feature list - Bluetooth, IM, and others - but then Verizon disabled several of the key features. Ilya writes:

What's going on here? This new phone supports free, built-in features that allows customers to send pictures and music to their computers and to friends' phones, to sync up phone and addressbook information, to use the phone as a modem, etc. These features bypass the Verizon network and consequently "deprive" Verizon of revenue, so Verizon locked their own customers out of the free features. This thinking is known as preferring a network-centric model over a client-centric model.

Why is this broken? Because instead of building brand loyalty by offering cool, new, inexpensive services via these new phones, Verizon is alienating their customers. Mainstream media is catching on, too... and there are now two hacker reward programs: if you figure out how to enable the missing technology, you get some cash. See www.nuclearelephant.com/papers/v710hackers.html.