More Noname Phones To Hit the USA

So you go to the nearest Cingular, T-mobile, Verizon, whatever store. Chances are pretty damn good that the phones there are made by one of the big guns: Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericssons, Samsung, etc. Maybe you’ll see a really small and ugly Pantech phone.

According to an article in BusinessWeek, you just might start seeing a lot of generic crap new brands popping up at a wireless store near you. Among them: Alcatel, ZTE, and Haier. Hey, doesn’t Haier make rice cookers?

Alcatel, of Alcatel-Lucent fame, is already a huge gun when it comes to expensive networking equipment. But then someone got greedy and decided, hey, let’s do a complete 180 and make cell phones for Americans. So now, under a separate company called Cellatel (what a horrible name), Alcatel is doing just that.

Some of the newer Alcatel phones that will be hitting the US market

It turns out that the smaller players have an easier time getting cozy with wireless service providers, most likely because they’re small. They can make concessions, and strike up potentially more lucrative deals for the service providers, all while getting their brand out there.

So competition is always good, unless you’re holding shares of Motorola or something like that. I for one would love to see some kind of variety in the Cingular store for once, instead of the same 10 crap phones.

Source: “North America’s Cell-Phone Land Grab” – Businessweek

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Other Mobile Phones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.