The Rise Of Pre-Pay

Verizon introduced a new pre-pay phone plan today: Smartphone Options for the Budget-Minded

Seventy dollars a month is hilariously overpriced and the three available phones suck too.

Although I’m glad to see the cellcos finally acknowledging the financial constraints most people are under, this is nothing more than throwing stale crumbs at people. At some point, either Sprint or T-Mobile will get truly desperate and revolutionary and drop all subscription plans, go all pre-pay, and demand phone makers like Samsung (and even Apple) drop the price of their hardware so it properly falls into line. The era of the overpriced seven-hundred-dollar smartphone will also then come to an end. And good bloody riddance to it!

Additional:

Walmart and Straight Talk to offer prepaid iPhone 4 and 5 starting January 11th

Previously here:

The Photo Foretelling Apple’s Doom

Apple’s To-Do List

A start, not meant to be seen as comprehensive.

In order:
1) Move past “What Would Steve Do?” (see here)
2) Create a post-Steve identity
3) Acknowledge You Can’t Have It All*

Not in order:
1) Get rid of App Store duplicate listings (see here)
2) Multi-user accounts for iOS (or at least a Guest Mode)
3) Better iOS multitasking (come on, it sucks; you know it does)
4) Allow iOS on-screen keyboard/input choice
5) Enable iOS Desk Accessory-like apps**
6) Add microSD card slot to iDevices (you already know you’ll have to)
7) Make iTunes/App Store a platform (see here)

* Having it all stifles competitive creativity (see: IBM, Microsoft)

** Why is something like a calculator a full app you must launch? Doesn’t anyone see how fucking stupid that is? Anyone at all? Hello, Jon Ive?

Three Things For Today

Be insanely valuable

Think yourself as a customer. Would you buy your own product? Do you think that your product is the best product out there? If you answered ‘no’, stop right now and think what you are really doing. Stop wasting your time, but more importantly stop wasting your customers time.

Archos needs to heed that advice.