I was at London’s Gatwick airport over the holiday break and noticed what might be a new trend - the selling and marketing of unlocked SIM free mobile phones in a mass-market consumer store. In Curry’s, the large electrical store, I found a section selling high end S60 Nokia phones without a phone contract. Later, while walking through the airport, I also saw Nokia adverts for SIM free phones.

Here in the UK and most of Europe, although people can purchase unlocked phones, many people don’t because most don’t even know this is possible because retailers push subsidised phones with high use tariffs. In many cases, especially for low use where all the bundled minutes tend not to be used, it’s cheaper to buy the phone SIM free and use it with a pay-as-you go or low use tariff. Furthermore, unlocked phones tend to be unencumbered by operator branding and missing functionality.

I very recently had a conversation with the guy who cuts my hair. He was blaming O2 because his NEC phone had malfunctioned and he couldn’t get to his call log. He seemed to think O2 had some way to remote configure his phone to allow/disallow access to such features. He said he would go to Vodafone as he previously didn’t have any problems before he moved to O2. He and many other mass-market consumers think the phone/carrier as one entity rather than any (unlocked) phone that can be used on any network.

My Gatwick airport experience shows that Nokia is starting to try to get consumers to think differently. If mass market consumers can be made to consider a phone as like a PC (that can be used with any ISP) then maybe they will take the next step to try more arbitrary services and applications rather than those fed by their network operator.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Series 60, Mobile, Phones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.