Handsets of value

The holiday season is upon us, and I for one am thrilled. The holidays are usually a time of family, joy, thanksgiving and good will toward all (except Dan Meyer)-and, of course, the holidays are also a time of cheap phones. Hurray for the holidays!
The holiday shopping season is traditionally rung in on Black Friday, the day bargain hunters adore and minimum-wage retail employees dread. It’s the day when otherwise normal people line up outside of stores before they open-a scene that always makes me think of the brain-starved zombies in “Dawn of the Dead.”
But enough about zombies.
Black Friday also heralds the cell-phone industry’s most important period. when handset makers unwrap their most advanced, thinnest, slickest phones, and it’s also the time when carriers dole out their largest handset subsidies.
Take, for example, Sprint Nextel, which just a few weeks before Black Friday introduced Motorola’s wildly popular Razr for the dirt-cheap price of $50. The carrier recently cut another $20 off that price, presumably to entice brain-starved shoppers . er . I mean, deal-hunting shoppers with a Razr just slightly cheaper than the one from Verizon Wireless.
Verizon Wireless of course is fighting back with new colors for its popular Chocolate music phone from LG. And in a snazzy marketing trick, the new colors (mint, white and cherry) also double as chocolate flavors. Snazzy.
Not to be outdone, Cingular Wireless is selling Samsung’s Synch phone for just $50. The Synch is one of the most advanced phones on the market today; the phone supports High Speed Downlink Packet Access connections, although I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a flesh-eating shopper . I mean, a bargain-crazy shopper who would know what High Speed Downlink Packet Access means. Unsubsidized, Samsung’s Synch would sell for as much as $600, but it seems the Black Friday Fairy magically made $550 of that disappear. Now that’s a snazzy marketing trick.
If there’s a lesson in this year’s Black Friday, it’s that subsidies are a part of the nation’s wireless lifestyle. Who’s going to pay full price for a phone (global average selling prices for handsets are still around $150) when you can get the world’s most colorful, advanced phones for $50?
So what does this mean? It means handset makers are not going to be able to go straight to consumers because they likely won’t subsidize their own products. It means consumers will now expect to get any phone for $50, no matter what it is or what it does. And it means carriers are going to have to put more of their marketing dollars toward subsidies, despite whatever their plans were to the contrary.
Or maybe that should be the wireless industry’s New Year’s Resolution: make handsets worth something again.