Smartphone Thoughts: The Frustrations of CDMA Devices

(this article was written with Pocket PC Phone Edition devices in mind, but it applies equally to the Smartphone market, perhaps even moreso because CDMA devices are so rare)

Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place: CDMA devices offer great transfer rates with EVDO, and in North America at least, UMTS is almost nowhere to be seen. So if you want speed, you need an EVDO device. As a Windows Mobile geek, my frustration is that there's not a lot of choice when it comes to devices. Worse, CDMA devices (well, outside of Korea at least) don't have SIM cards that can easily move from one device to another. Why is that so frustrating for me? A few years ago, Samsung sent me an i700 for review. I was excited to review it, and had emailed the head of PR for Telus (our CDMA carrier here) in Alberta. She agreed to loan me an account with 1xRTT data so I could test the device. Great right? Not quite.

It turns out that Telus, like many CDMA carriers in North America, will not activate devices that originate from outside their network. Telus is particularly strict about this, because the engineers refused to activate the phone even with the PR person trying to convince them. Can you believe that? So, ultimately I had to send it to Janak to review, and he dished out an amazingly thorough review.
Three years later, the situation repeated itself: Microsoft sent me a Palm Treo 700w to review. I was looking forward to it, long being envious of the hardware design of the Palm OS Treo. This time, I knew Telus wasn't going to activate it, so I didn't even bother trying. It was pre-activated on the Verizon network, the idea being I'd just be on voice/data roaming here in Canada. I happily unpacked the box, charged it up...and promptly couldn't get any data service. A bit of debugging here and there, several emails back and forth with my contacts at Microsoft, and they opted to send me another one. The second 700w had exactly the same problem. :( This time I got connected directly with Verizon support and they were unable to explain why it wouldn't roam. So I ended up sending the second 700w back, and once again, Janak ended up writing a huge review on the phone that I couldn't review (though he didn't get the phone from me this time). You'd almost think this was nothing more than me wanting to get Janak to write reviews once every three years. :lol:

So in the end, it always comes back to the same things: CDMA devices, no matter how cool, are significantly less flexible when it comes to being able to easily connect to any carrier. Mobile device geeks like me don't wait for a device to be offered by carriers, especially not Canadian carriers who tend to be six to twelve months behind their counterparts in the USA (it used to be much worse, believe me). The Qualcomm announcement is good news, but there's no indication of anything changing with regards to seeing SIM cards in CDMA phones. The CDMA carriers enjoy their lock-in power a little too much, and don't realize it's likely costing them more customers than it's keeping them.

So I remain a GSM guy with a SIM card, always looking for the ultimate Windows Mobile device - and never being able to step into the realm of true wireless high-speed.