The Future, Unlocked

This is an abbreviated of a much longer story that I am writing. The best part is that it is not quite over yet.

This is a story of lust. This is a story of dreams. This is a story of good intentions and bad exectution. This is a story about a Nokia N70.

I had finished writing a paper for my class last spring, and was feeling elated. Hey.....I thought....let's go to to Ebay....

Anyone that knows me knows that I like small electronic gadgets. It is a perversity that I decry unusable design but I contingue to fall for little blinky things. I currently have a Sony Ericsson P900 (great phone) and a Blackberry 8700. But I really wanted....a Nokia N90, which is a curious hybrid of video camera and phone. And it costs $600 new.

But hey....what's this? The Nokia N70. Two cameras -- one in front for video conferencing, the other a 2 megapixel camera. Good reviews. And what do you know.....here's one for pretty cheap!

Let's bid! Oh, what the heck. I will lowball, and of course lose at the last minute.

What the heck! I won the bid. Cool. Oh wait....what's this? It's locked to Orange in the UK. Oh, that's not a problem. Nokia phones can be unlocked with software. No problemo.

Wow! What a cool phone. It's a little smaller than the P900. The screen is smaller, but that's okay. The camera is quite nice, way better than the P900. And it shoots video!

But wait.....what are all these people asking to get their N70 unlocked? What this thing about BB5?

(Fast Forward to Now)

So, I am looking at this phone these many months later, and it's still sits locked. A reminder of my folly, but also something that has taken me on a journey. I am planning on recounting this in full detail.

But for now, I want to fast forward to the conclusion. That devices that the end user won't be able to unlock are becoming the norm. The iPod bridges the gap between commonly supported commercial and non-commercial media sources, but your cable company's DVR is not yours to do with what you want. That would seem reasonable, since the cable company rents it to the customer.

But what about a cell phone? In the past, it was possible for customers to reuse cell phones, mainly GSM phones (the prevalent standard throughout the world). The Nokia N series (Nokia N70, N90, N93 etc) represent a device that the customer is never able to completely own, even if they buy it. They are at the mercy of the specific cell provider that issued the phone. In my case, it is Orange UK, which charges 20 pounds to unlock, but only if they decide that they want to. They don't have to do it.

So, these cell phones will end up in a landfill somewhere, because they can't be reused by moving to another carrier unless the carrier decides to release the phone, or someone shells out $$. This is really just presaging other devices tied to specific services, things build on "service models" that build in the essentially disposable nature of technology. This is the yard sale WebTV boxes, perhaps the future of Akimbo boxes.

This is not a sustainable future. I mean this from both an ecological viewpoint, but also from a society/culture/futurist viewpoint.

--hal