However, that piece of armor is no longer in my arsenal. It has been replaced by a White 32GB 3GS. But though I start by bragging about my new gear, this post is more about the latest war being waged on the wireless telecomm battlefield of guam.

Thanks to the powers that be at Apple coupled with the lethargic efforts of our local carriers, up until very recently, Guam wireless carriers were not able to obtain iPhones for sale to us Guammies.  A few local consumer electronic shops advertised unlocked iPhones for sale at astronomical prices. I was skeptical about these offerings and could never bring myself to inquire with these shops as to the reliability and genuineness of the units they were selling.

The only other option for us geeks was to forage for ourselves in the deep, dark recesses of eBay for that hidden gem that is a safely unlocked iPhone.

First came the hardware unlocked phones –  with solutions ranging from razor hacked sim cards to TurboSIMs from unknown vendors. How legal could that be? And even if it were legal, how reliable could it be? Remember, we’re talking about a several hundred dollar investment that could potentially be the most expensive paper weight you ever bought if you get burned. I couldn’t bring myself to taking this chance.

Eventually, the community of hackers intent on releasing the iPhone platform from the regulatory hands of Apple proper, found a way to unlock the iPhone using software alone.  I believe it was around the same time that Apple began distributing iPhones to countries and locales that would not allow Apple or their partner wireless carriers to lock the phones.  Thus began the proliferation of “factory unlocked” and “software unlocked” iPhones.

It was then that I felt confident enough to make the plunge and gamble on purchasing an unlocked iPhone from eBay.  My first iPhone, a white 16GB 3G, arrived earlier this year.  After much research, I confirmed that my phone was “software unlocked” by third-party software and NOT “factory unlocked”.  Boo hoo. I did not have the luxury of being able to receive the firmware updates that Apple distributes via iTunes. I was lucky enough to already have version 3.0, but when I got it, iTunes was already asking me to upgrade to 3.0.1. Today, it’s already at 3.1.2. That would prove to be the bane of my ownership of an unlocked iPhone.

When GTA MPulse announced that they would be officially selling the iPhone, my first reaction was that of mild amusement.  I thought, “Oh, how nice. Finally. That’s okay because I’ve already got an iPhone.”  But then, remembering the frustrations with my unlocked phone and it’s shortcomings, I began to contemplate a replacement.

GTA was smart to strike up their deal with Apple to sell the iPhone.  I don’t know how difficult it was or why it took so long for any of the local GSM carriers to make it happen but it was the smartest thing GTA has ever done in their wireless business plan.  Apple has set up the iPhone for long term success. In the mainland, the iPhone arguably is the only reason that AT&T continues to survive in the highly competitive market there.  GTA will ride on those coat-tails for years to come.

Another Guam carrier, Docomo Pacific also made a smart move, albeit not quite as smart as GTA.  They did not get the official license to sell iPhones in Guam. I’m not sure if Apple would be willing to give one to them now that GTA has one.  They haven’t given one to T-Mobile. But Docomo did realize that absolutely nothing would be able to compete with the pent up demand that has developed on Guam for the iPhone. Well, nothing except . . . the iPhone.

So they did what they knew would be the only thing they could to prevent a mass exodus of their non-contracted customers. They bought up a bunch of factory unlocked iPhones from some country that Apple sends unlocked iPhones and put a full page ad in the paper on GTA’s big launch day. They even offered them for essentially the exact same amount that GTA offered them. GTA’s pricing mirrors the Apple Store and AT&T stores. I have a feeling GTA’s pricing might be mandated by Apple as official resellers of the iPhone.  I’m sure Docomo is taking a big hit on the cost of the unit as I am certain they are paying premium dollar for the factory unlocked units they are procuring.  But so goes the battle for monthly access revenue, right?

Docomo has taken quite a beating from critics for their guerrilla marketing tactics.  Although I agree that their failure to beat GTA signing up with Apple is pretty sad (they are only the oldest and largest wireless carrier in Guam), I respect their marketing team for what needed to be done based on the situation at hand and actually acting on it.

That being said, I have to admit that I am a Docomo user. I have been a Docomo customer since their early years in the mid 90s when they were known as Guam Cellular and Paging with the exception of a short stint using iDen based push-to-talk phones with iConnect Guam. I have always been partial to Docomo as my experience has been that their cellular network is the most reliable and robust.  It will take more than an official Apple reseller license to get me to switch away from Docomo.

So fast foward to today, where I am the proud new owner of a factory unlocked iPhone courtesy of Docomo Pacific.  Sorry, GTA, you guys get credit for your efforts, but a cell phone is a cell phone –  and is only as good as the cell service it is attached to.

My best advice to all the telecomm companies out there is first establish what you consider to be core products and services and make those products transparent.  A wireless company advertising ‘reliable coverage’ makes it seem like that is a special feature.  Shouldn’t that be a given? Reliable and robust core services is what keeps your existing customer base from jumping ship at the next big marketing campaign of your competitors.

Once you’ve gotten a good handle on your core services, then don’t sit idle. Start growing your services with new and innovative products.  That’s what attracts new customers and grows your market base.

If you aren’t able to develop these primary business practices, then you’ll forever be damned to reactive marketing efforts and the growth of your business will be dictated by the market and your competitors and not the other way around.

Jason Salas and I had several discussions about how the Guam web community has been so slow to embrace twitter.  We both agreed that part of twitter’s appeal in the US mainland is the mobile access convenience.  Something that is not possible here in Guam unless you are graced with a smartphone, a la Blackberry, iPhone or Android.  We decided that we wanted to see if that was a doable service and if it was something that we might be able to offer.

We have now been working on this new project, now called TwitterNeni for a little over a month now.  I’ve been so engrossed in the development side of the project that I haven’t once taken a minute to write about this whole experience.  The service is up and running and the official public beta was released on Monday, April 27, 2009.   The launch has gone surprisingly well without so much as a hiccup along the way.  I’ve got so much to talk about regarding my experience developing the application and the supporting infrastructure.  But I’ll save that for a later post and I’ll just keep this post about the service itself.

If you’re curious about what Twitter is, check it out.  It’s a “microblogging” platform.  Participant members think of it just as bloggers do, but the brevity of the medium allows for much faster, more efficient means of communication and interaction.  It’s really one of those things in which the experience cannot  be explained but must be experienced to truly be understood.  As you can see by the scarcity of my own blog posts, I am not one to take alot of time updating my blog.  But I am constantly on Twitter, giving my 140 characters worth.

With the new service, Jason and I have created, now us Guam tweeters can do it while on the go, too.

So anyway, about a month ago, he posted a call for help asking for donations to help him get out to a concert in California.  Wanting to help him out, I was one of many youtubers that sent donations for his cause.  Not surprisingly, he raised enough money very fast.  I think it might have been in less than 24 hours, but I can’t be sure.

As a show of appreciation, he used the donation information for a raffle to give away a few CDs and t-shirts.  He posted the video of him and his roomies doing the drawing.  It was kinda cheezy, but it was a nice gesture that he did a shout out to ALL the donators (sp?).

The best part for me . . . right about 6:00 when his roommate pulls my ticket. The hilarity starts because he has no idea what GU stands for. AJ figures it stands for Guam, but can’t contain himself and walks off camera. Then his roomie Pablo butchers Dededo, the name of the city that I’m from.  But then Pablo saves the day and gets my name perfect!!! Who woulda’ thought? GREAT SAVE, PABLO!!!

So goes my first exposure on YouTube.

Keep up the great work, AJ and keep reaching for the stars.  . . . and remember through it all, do it all for the glory of God.

Anyone who has spent any amount of time in Guam surely can recognize this familiar phrase.  It’s a mantra that  locals use in reference to many of the unusual oddities that are unique to our quaint little island.  On rare occasion, one would use it in a positive sense, like . . . um . . . Wow!! For the life of me, I can’t think of a good positive example right now.  But anyway, coming back to my point, it is usually used in a negative connotation and pokes fun at how here in Guam, you could get away with things that you couldn’t get away with anywhere else, just because people around here accept it as normal practice.

But I digress.  My thoughts for today are actually about the phrase itself – “ONLY ON GUAM”.  I find it humourously coincidental that “only on Guam” would you even say the phrase “only on Guam.”  (I would have used ironic instead of coincidental, but extensive research into the proper usage of the word irony has only left me confused as to whether this would be an acceptable use of the word.)  By anyone else’s standards, we would say “Only IN Guam.” But we Guamanians say “on Guam” in every place that anywhere else, any other english speaking person would say “in Guam”.  But mind you, we only use it when referring to being in Guam, nowhere else.  Try it for yourself.  Would you say, “I live on California?” or “My cousin has been on Hawaii since last year.” Even our nearby cousins don’t say, “I’ll be on Saipan for the next two weeks.”  Isn’t that weird?

I’ve brought this up to many people who live here and I’ve always gotten the same kind of reactions – “I never realized that.”; “You’re right!  Why do we say that?”; “We’re not the only one’s who say it that way.  What about . . . hmm.  I guess your right.”  Even people that have moved to Guam from other places have obtusely adopted this Guam-speak without even realizing it.  Now keep in mind that I am not saying that this is improper english, as essentially, the phrase is correct.  Being that Guam is an island, you literally would be considered on Guam or off Guam.  I just find it odd that “only on Guam” do we make that distinction.

Now I’ve brought this point up to several people, both local home-grown and of foreign origin.  And like I said, many had never put much thought into it and hardly even realized that Guamanians make that odd differentiation.  Which leads me to wonder if my strange fascination with this grammatical anomaly is a healthy thing.  Nevertheless, when I go on to my next question and ask why they think that we say it that way, I usually just a get a dumbfounded look and some incoherent grunt as an answer.

Of the few discernable conversations that I have had about this, I have come up with at least two theories to the origin of saying “ON GUAM”.  The first has to do with the fact that a very common term used here in Guam is that a person can be considered to be off-island when they are outside of Guam.  This term is commonly used when describing a period of time in which a person normally residing in Guam would be away from Guam.  Comparable statements used by non-Guamanians would be out of state, or out of town.  The term off-island seems very logical and actually makes for a convenient term for referring to travel abroad away from Guam.  Now the opposite of that, when a person returns or is not absent from Guam, would logically be called being on-island.  Could this unique terminology used by locals living in Guam have spawned the odd usage of the term on Guam?

The second theory doesn’t have much to support it.  But I remember a particual song from my youth.  I don’t even remember who it was made popular by. . . maybe Jimmy Dee, or maybe I remember a Jesse Bias remake.  But what I do remember is there is a lyric somewhere in the song that goes something like “On the island of Guam . . . where the coconuts grow . . .”  That’s all I can remember about the song so if anyone recognizes it, please give me a hint.  It’s a well known local song sung by a well known local artist.  I’m just really bad about remembering song titles and artists. (My friend Jas can attest to that.)  But again, I digress.  Could it be that this song had such an influence on local slang and conversation that the phrase “On the island of Guam” became the “proper” way to refer to being here in Guam?  I know, it’s a weak theory, but it seems like a cool backstory, so I thought I’d at least bring it up.

Well, whatever the origin of the phrase; and despite my concession that it is NOT improper grammer, I have committed myself to make it my own personal crusade to campaign to the people of Guam to rise up from the cobbled ruins of the past.  We are not inhabitants living on top of some tiny little landform which we cannot even refer to as a place that we live “in”.  Okay, maybe Guam is a tiny little rock in a vast expanse of ocean.  But let’s not remind ourselves everytime we make reference to the place we call home.  Say it with me, “ONLY IN GUAM!! ONLY IN GUAM!! ONLY IN GUAM!!”

Talk about spot on.  He’s really got his finger on the pulse of Guam’s tech industry, or lack of therein.  People in Guam have always known that our island has been slow to adopt anything modern.  It comes with the territory (no pun intended).  We’re a small rock in the middle of the largest ocean on this Earth with a population of some 100,000 or so.  What else can you expect, right?

But hey, we’re a territory of the world’s largest superpower!!  We’ve got, not one, but TWO U.S. military bases here.  That makes us a strategic military resource to our mother country.  We’ve also got this HUGE multi-billion dollar tourism industry that is a significant market segment of the outbound tourist traffic from Japan – the country with the world’s largest number of tourist based outbound travel.  And why wouldn’t we.  Our island’s a beautiful island paradise and is US soil, so when you’re here, you can feel confident that you are in a safe place.

Therein lies Guam’s identity conundrum.  Jason did a great job of giving Guam’s tech report card.  Now here’s my shot at playing parent-teacher conference and explaining why Guam’s such a disappoint to so many.  Especially many of whom choose to call Guam their home.

You see, no matter what we think of Guam, because of geographic logistics, we will always be just like the little rural town of Sleepy, Iowa (sorry that’s a fictituos stereotypical town, not real) that doesn’t have a metropolis within 1,000 miles of it.  Run by an overweight Sheriff and his cousin the Judge; with a Mayor who keeps getting elected because his wife makes the best apple pie.

We see it portrayed all the time on TV, but we won’t admit that we aren’t that much different.  Everyone in Guam knows everyone else and when you do meet someone for the first time, you’re guaranteed to run into them again sometime in the future.  The same people or their people and their friends run the government.  The big businesses in Guam are all owned by an elite few.  Whenever a big company, i.e. K Mart, Home Depot, come in, everyone gets excited but there’s always those complaining that they’re killing the local business owners.  In fact, how many times has someone tried to use the “Support local businesses” marketing tactic on you?

Despite our true grass roots and small island heritage, everyone watches MTV and Friends and tries to make Guam the big city metropolis that it isn’t.  Okay, we’re lucky.  We’ve got tourism.  So that supports having a Sandcastle (for those wondering, it’s a Vegas style production house), and some nice cappuccino shops and a couple fancy discotheques.  And us local folk get to take advantage of those nice amenities.  Even with a  local discount because we can’t really afford to pay what it really costs to keep them running.

On top of that, because we have tourism and a military presence, we’ve always got big business and sophisticated city folk coming here all the time with their fancy ideas and cool clothes and us island folk get all jealous and want the same thing.  Unfortunately, we aren’t really that well edumacated and we’re really just a bunch of fisherman and farmers.

Now with that as a backdrop, let’s add on the fact that again we’re a small population on a tiny rock in the middle of the Pacific where it costs more to ship an apple here than it does to grow it.  Can we really expect to ever reap in the modern luxuries that our counterparts in New York City and Hollywood do?  Well, its a motivation that’s commendable.  We should stay positive and strive to achieve greatness.  But this is my way of saying – Keep your feet on the ground as you reach for the sky.  (Before anyone cries foul, I AM paraphrasing the great Casey Kasem.)

Well, my blog editor is telling me I’m well on my way to a 1,000 word essay, so I’m gonna cut it here.  Until next time, keep on keepin’ on.