Why revenue sharing failed

It was a nice experiment. Apple sells the phones for almost full price and gets a share of revenues from those who subscribe to AT&T. The AT&T did not suffer badly - it pays only for those who actually use its services. At first, it looks pretty good, especially for Apple. It is a nice example of market segmentation (discrimination). If warranty and safety is valuable (or service provided by AT&T does not seem much worse than others), you pay full price. If you do, you still pay for the phone. Apple gets less, but more than if you would not buy at all.
What did not work well is that more people choose to unlock and jailbreak than anybody expected. In the profit equation, revenue was probably high enough, but the share of people delivering this revenue was too small.

Too good to be true

When something sounds too good to be true, it usually is. New IPhone, 8GB, GPS, 3G, whatever, for $199? This beats every phone in Czech Republic on quality or price and most phones on both. Sure, if you HAVE to subscribe to AT&T for $70/month, total cost to ownership are around $1900 (I pay basically zero for voice), which is way out of my league.

IPhone and the others

IPhone seems to be a big success and every mobil phone producer is trying to find an appropriate answer. Some of them are slowly realizing on of the main advantages of the IPhone: lack of keyboard.
Yes, I mean it. Take a look at BlackBerry. It is big, the keyboard takes one half of the space and it is not even a good keyboard. Since there is a limit on the size of the phone (the size of the pockets in the suit), the screen has to be smaller if the keyboard is bigger. Yet, what for do you use a phone? I'm willing to bet that most people primarily read (and thus need big, clear screen), and maybe type a few short answers to the emails. Most email, blog posts and memos are written on the computer.
The phone is just a way to keep up with the recent developments when you are on a run (bus, train,...) and do not have access to the computer. Trying to create a reasonable good keyboard is pointless. The price is too high - smaller screen or bulkier phone.
I'm happy that somebody understood, let's just hope others will copy (as it is well known, the imitation is the sincerest form of flattery) soon and there will be choice for the consumers.
P.S. I'm not saying that the Apple was the first to completely give up on the physical keyboard, it just probably happens to be most successful one. Probably, as we know, good ideas do not always succeed at first...