To which the iPhone has already and that Android will be expanding upon is the United States role reversal from Europe in leading wireless development. This can be seen in the European Symbian Foundation playing catch up with the increasingly popular American iPhone and Android mobile software by broadening its membership today to include Acrodea, Brycen, HI Corporation, Ixonos, KTF, Opera Software, Sharp, TapRoot Systems and UIQ Technology.
Business Week had a great article that reminded me of when I went to Europe back in 2003 that the phones there were so much better than in the U.S. and everyone was text messaging. Texting seemed cumbersome to me at the time as I was used to leaving a voice message that I felt would be more descriptive than frustratingly typing shorthand with a numerical pad.
In Estonia at that time you could even use your phone to pay for parking and make bank transactions via text. Europeans would proudly boast it is because of their unified government mandated network technology GSM and smaller landmass with denser populations that allowed them to be at the forefront of cell technology in comparison to the fragmented wireless standards and large landmass of the United States.
It is interesting that in time as the free market and competition ultimately decides the best standards and companies to lead the wireless landscape for the United States that it not only catches up but surpasses Europe in better phones and high speed networks….this could also be an interesting analogy to socialized medicine which Europe also boasts about. Europe used to get all the new phones first before being handed down to America, now its the iPhone first launched in the U.S. and waiting for Europe to catch up in network speeds to really use it.
Notice that it is in America that the German owned T-Mobile will launch the HTC Dream G1 with Android and then later hand it down to Europe.
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@Mr. Cat
I was not trying to spawn a political or societal debate but simply my opinion to where I saw an analogy.
I have experienced both the US and European health systems directly and did not care for the European bureaucracy and quality of care in comparison to that in America.
Rather than say one is better than the other I would prefer something similar to the innovation of the Taiwanese health care system – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89651916
No apologies needed as you made an intelligent point.
I can see how general opinion would find the analogy laughable but it is based on my experience and information below the surface of the health care political debate.
Did you check out the Taiwan health care system?
It makes sense from a pragmatic sense but you know it would be objected to in the US due to privacy concerns with the centralized smart card system storing each person’s entire medical history.
“.this could also be an interesting analogy to socialized medicine which Europe also boasts about.”
I’m sorry, WHAT!?
The only thing worse than the broken American medical system is the ethnocentric Americans who are too stubborn to admit that it’s just not working and care is not going to those who need it most!!
Haha my bad, I hope that didn’t sound to aggressive =D
I just found your correlation ridiculous! I lol’d. I really did. :p
And what would the ‘European Health Care System’ be? I’m afraid there is no such thing, as every country has it’s own healt care system – with its ups and downs. You’d have to compare individual countrie’s systems to get a valid result.