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everyone would see Apple as an innept company who didn't give a shot about spelling.
If not looking inept (for spelling or, more likely, otherwise) was the case then...
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What's not clear, though, is whether those prices are before or after any subsidies Cingular might offer to get people to sign up for service plans. (Carriers typically discount phones by $200 or so to entice people to sign up for extended plans. If $500 and $600 are prices without a subsidy and service contract commitment, it could be a decent deal.) But either way, at these prices Apple is probably locking itself out of a market that has been key to the iPod's success: the youth market. Cingular's sure to sell iPhones with plenty of talk time and an unlimited data usage, and I suspect such a plan will cost at least $90 a month. High school and college students can't afford that, and neither can many recent college grads.
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Also, Apple also decided to sign a multi-year exclusive deal with Cingular (T), which instantly makes it the enemy of not only every phone maker in the world, but also every other carrier in the United States – including giant Verizon (VZ). What's more, by announcing in January 2007 that the iPhone won't arrive in Asia until 2008, Apple has given electronics rivals Samsung and Sony (SNE) (among others) plenty of time to do their best phone work, release it first on their home turf, and even bring it to the U.S. to compete with the iPhone on every network but Cingular's.
(From here).
You can get away doing this if you've got a large cell phone portfolio like we do. It's the business kiss of death to screw yourself over like this being that exclusive with one (1) cell phone. The knock off kings in Asia will trump ya moments after word has leaked or you've announced the next-new-mobile-to-top-all-mobiles. The Mobile Phone segment is an awfully agressive one that take no prisoners. They entered into a marketspace that they're not creating, making business decision moves as if they were, and didn't even bother to read up on what the thorns are in the sides of their competition, let alone one-time partner when they licensed the "potted" iPod player component to Motorola. Fercryinoutloud - they should have at least bought a GSM component that was 3G compatible - instead they indicated they're only shipping with a 2G varient (per a "rebuttal" from Nokia's CEO basing his observation from on-site Nokia observers at CES earlier this week).