I’ve always said that unbranded is always better than branded, when talking about phones, and I stand by that. However, there’s also something to be said for phone manufacturers getting carriers to pick up and subsidize their phones – and usually, unfortunately, that means the phone will be branded to the carrier.
European carriers, with some exceptions, tend to add minimal branding to their phones – typically, it’s just some aesthetic changes like a default theme, custom icons, and the like. Sometimes, these brandings also include custom carrier-only applications, like on 3′s X-series devices. Historically, all of the Symbian-powered smartphones that AT&T has offered in the U.S. have been horribly branded into oblivion – this includes such disasters as the Nokia E62, Nokia N75, and more recently, the Nokia 6650.
Alone, these weren’t bad devices. Unfortunately, AT&T required Nokia to remove most of the useful apps and features on the phones, replacing them with crap like the MEdiaMall and AT&T’s Java restrictions, which caused Opera Mini and Google Maps Mobile (back when it was a Java app) to be completely useless. All along, I and others blamed AT&T, saying that AT&T simply didn’t understand the Symbian platform, and that’s partially true (from my observations over the years).
However, recently, AT&T launched the Motorola Backflip, confirming that not only do they not ‘get’ Symbian, but they clearly don’t ‘get’ Android, either. The Motorola Backflip, which uses Google’s Android operating system, actually had all of its Google-ness removed and replaced with Yahoo!, of all things (AT&T has close ties to Yahoo!). Worse yet, the ability to install non-Market apps was removed from the Motorola Backflip.
Of course, you could say that AT&T is entitled to add whatever crapware they want to their devices, since they’re the ones subsidizing them, which is true to an extent. However, other devices, such as the Apple iPhone and their Windows Mobile-powered smartphones, do not tend to show nearly as much branding and restrictions as AT&T’s Symbian and now Android-powered offerings.
The conclusion? AT&T doesn’t ‘get’ smartphones, really. This fact has really hurt Nokia’s potential sales in the United States (though I think with the E71x they’re making headway), but it’s now much more obviously an AT&T problem and not so much a Nokia issue. Luckily, T-Mobile is now launching its first Symbian-powered smartphone in *years*, the Nokia Nuron. We’re working to get a review unit at CasaGuru, to see exactly how much branding T-Mobile is going to force on us.
