“Unless, of course, Verizon has cut an iPhone deal with Apple (AAPL)–in which case it’s just lousy news for Palm.”

The iPhone is not exclusive to AT&T. It runs on over 100 carriers worldwide. About 90 of those carriers have partnerships with Apple, but that is not necessary because iPhone is a standard GSM phone. Something like 10% of all original iPhones were purchased in the US and shipped to China.

There is no monopoly. The iPhone is available unlocked, you can run it on any GSM network you choose.

> Perhaps it’s time to breakup
> Verizon and AT&T

The iPhone is a standard quad-band GSM phone. That’s the phone equivalent of making a PC with Wi-Fi. The benefit of Wi-Fi is it’s a widely-supported standard. You can take your Dell notebook to Starbucks and hook it onto their wireless network because both notebook and network speak Wi-Fi.

If you took your Wi-Fi notebook PC to a coffee shop that advertised “wireless Internet” and it was a proprietary wireless Internet instead of Wi-Fi and you could not attach your Dell to it, that would be how Verizon is in phones.

Verizon does not support GSM, you cannot attach your GSM phone to their network. They use a proprietary protocol which requires special Verizon hardware to be inserted into the phone. That is why the iPhone does not run on Verizon. Well, that and Verizon turned Apple down when Apple offered to make them a special iPhone in 2006. But the reason you can’t take your iPhone into a Verizon store and start running it on Verizon is 100% technical. The iPhone is open/standardized, and Verizon is closed/proprietary.

So in order for the iPhone to run on Verizon, Apple would have to create an entirely new model just for Verizon, sold only by Verizon to Verizon subscribers, useful only on Verizon, never to run on any other network in the world for its whole life. Implying that Apple is monopolistic or nefarious because they didn’t build a proprietary phone for Verizon is, frankly, ludicrous. Especially when Apple offered and Verizon turned them down.

Think about it: how can Apple making a proprietary version of the iPhone for Verizon make the iPhone more open?

> Open systems and open devices

Open in a telecom context means standard GSM. In the US, AT&T has the only nationwide GSM network. The iPhone is only available in a GSM version. Both the iPhone and the AT&T network are as open as telecom gets. The fact that every iPhone has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, an HTML5 browser, an ISO MPEG-4 media player, Unix networking, and conforms to many, many other international technical standards that most phones do not only underscores how ridiculous it is to deride the iPhone as proprietary. The only proprietary part is the native app platform. In the history of the world, nobody has made a native app platform that is not proprietary. And the HTML5 environment on iPhone is an open app platform to balance that out. Developers can target either app platform.

Examples of closed telecom: Verizon network (proprietary), Sprint network (proprietary), Palm Pre (proprietary). If you think open systems and open devices should be the mantra then you will for sure want to avoid all contact or interaction with these proprietary telecom devices. Sprint and Verizon are only now saying they’ll allow Wi-Fi on their proprietary phones. So acting like there is some panacea outside of AT&T in telecom just shows how little you know about it.