walt mossberg has a very nice writeup of what’s wrong with the current mobile phone software model (though, it seems to be less of a lock-in here in old europe than in the “colonies” ;-):

Suppose you own a Dell computer, and you decide to replace it with a Sony. You don’t have to get the permission of your Internet service provider to do so, or even tell the provider about it. You can just pack up the old machine and set up the new one.

when we did a consulting project for a large european mobile phone operator several years ago (looking at and developing, among others, the personal mobile hub idea out of which came the IBM Personal Care Connect system for monitoring patients) we learned that you need to get type approval for new mobile phone in (back than) about 70 different jurisdictions — and, that if you even moved the holes for the microphone a couple of millimeters that you had to redo the whole certification! yikes…

with the true cost of an SMS being around £750 per MByte in the UK (about CHF 1‘074 per MByte with my swiss provider) it becomes obvious that a mobile phone operator license is a license to print money nowadays: you can charge outrageous fees on data and SMS and on “roaming surcharges” (funny, isn’t it, how difficult it seems to be to merge in all those data records from those foreign mobile phone operators, why it seems to requires them at least 10% more work to do that!), plus you can keep your customers locked in…at least you think you can