Ewan McCleod, from SMSTextNews has been putting off writing about the US mobile market. Now based in San Francisco, he's been considering trying to buy a mobile phone like a regular consumer, and he's seriously shocked at what he discovered.

You know it’s bad when you’re sitting in The Cheesecake Factory minding your own business trying to get your iPhone to log on to the wifi connection of the Apple store across the road and two young twenty-somethings arrive at the table next to you. I’m not looking at their dress, or their faces. I’m looking at their handsets. The first thing they do is sit down and bring out their phones. My face mentally drops as I realise one girl is sporting a piece of shit Motorola RAZR and another is sporting an abhorrent rounded clamshell rubbish LG. There’s no hope. No hope for America for the time being. Write it off. Forget applications, forget innovation. 

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