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European nations worry about American foreign policy as a harbinger of the downfall of an empire. Radical Islamists point to our half-nekkid women on TV and rampant capitalism as evidence of inevitable decay and self-destruction. But if you want to know the real problem with 21st century America, just answer the phone.

It sucks, doesn’t it? Your phone, that is. Your phone, and your plan, and your phone service carrier who might as well be your very large, lonely prison cellmate. Named Brutus.

The state of American mobile telephony is tragic. While hipsters in Europe have been able to make mobile-to-mobile video calls for months, gadget freaks in America have been so dumbed-down by our crappy options that they’re now caught up in the warrantless multiple orgasm that is iPhone Anticipation. Omigod we’ve never seen a phone that can do such things! Take my kidneys, please!

The problem is, the iPhone sucks. Yeah, I said it, and I say it as a 3-Mac-owning Apple aficionado, too. Oh, sure, surfing the web all horizontal-like and being able to tap the particular voicemail you want is pretty nifty, but the bar was set way higher than that for a company like Apple to go and release a product with such gaping holes in the feature set:

• A 2MP camera that won’t capture video. So much for citizen journalism!
• If you do take a nice picture with your lame half-camera, forget texting it to your friends’ mobiles, b/c iPhone doesn’t support MMS! The iPhone apologists say, “Oh, but you can just send it to them with the built-in rich HTML email app!” Yeah, except then you have to figure out which mobile network provider all your friends are on and update their address book card with the appropriate number@providernetwork.com address. That’ll be fun!
• No IM chatting with your friends on computer-based messaging clients. C’mon, even my RAZR can do that.
• No GPS. Not a real deal breaker, but you shouldn’t make such a big deal over your mapping application if it can’t put YOU on the damn map.

All that and an unreplaceable battery for only $600! You know what you could already be caressing and licking and doing all kinds of geeky things with if you weren’t a US cellular customer? Something like the Nokia N95, an awesome device that already offers WiFi and GPS (and 3G connectivity for the non-US users) along with an MP3 player and amazing 30fps VGA video recording (and on-handset editing). (Tech vlogger Steve Garfield passed through town recently and showed us his shiny new N95; it was love at first sight. Check out the video quality Nokias deliver on one of his blip.tv episodes.) You can keep your iPhone, this thing has become my #1 motivating factor to finish my dissertation (graduation present, anyone?). Oh, sure, you can buy one in the US, but don’t expect to get one from AT&T or T-Mobile; why would they want you to have something really great?

Again, it’s easy to be wowed by such an offering when our cellular providers conspire to take even the modest advances in our lame handsets like the RAZR and cripple them into complete suckitude by limiting any new functionality they don’t want us to have. Columbia law professor Tim Wu recently published a paper detailing ridiculous cellular business practices:

The wireless industry, over the last decade, has succeeded in bringing wireless telephony at competitive prices to the American public. Yet at the same time we also find the wireless carriers aggressively controlling product design and innovation in the equipment and application markets, to the detriment of consumers. Their policies, in the wired world, would be considered outrageous, in some cases illegal, and in some cases simply misguided.

I heard Professor Wu on the March 2 episode of On the Media, and it was reaffirming to hear someone of such stature give voice at the national level to the kinds of things that I’d been steaming about since sending my first crappy, unintelligible, 15-second video clip from my RAZR. But steaming turned to blood-boiling when OTM gave airtime to the opposition, a lying, slithering hack from CTIA, the mobile telecom industry association, Chris Guttman McCabe:

I would challenge, you know, you or your audience to find an industry that is more competitive, particularly in the telecommunications space, than what we have here in the wireless industry.

I would start from the premise that there isn’t a need for regulation unless there’s a failure, a market failure. You have, for all intents and purposes, exactly what government wants. You have an ultra-competitive industry.

Yeah, except that all of the competitors are offering the exact same crap with only the most minor of variations in packaging and pricing.

You know, if that is something that’s wanted, then that will happen. Carriers didn’t have cameras in their phones two or three years ago. Now almost every single phone has it.
So you know, our carriers absolutely listen to the customers. They do surveys. They reach out. And the reason they do is because it’s in their best interest to serve their customers.

What a crock! If the network providers were actually willing and eager to give us what we wanted, they wouldn’t have to coerce us into staying through $200 contract termination fees to get out of the two year relationships from hell we agreed to to get a discount on our crippled handsets.