Market segmentation. Prepaid plans offer lower-quality handsets, are less flexible, and tend to gouge you if you have high usage.
Ultimately they're deliberately not designed for people who get a lot of use out of their phones, because the point is not to sell them to those people.
Where I'm from it's so odd to think about what handsets a carrier "offer". First of all, I haven't bought a phone from a carrier since 1999, second, all the carriers here have all the phones, or you can get any phone on whatever carrier you want through an independent electronics store (where you'll still get a subsidy)
This is really one of the worst dysfunctions of mobile telephony today, at least in North America.
The cell phone carriers have an iron grip on the sales channel for cell phones, and that sales channel is the oxygen supply for handset manufacturers. Realistically that means that Samsung needs to sell to Verizon, not Verizon's customers.
Interested in why the HTC One X hasn't sold very well? In spite of equivalent electronics compared to Samsung and far superior build quality? It's because Verizon and AT&T got pissed off at HTC a year ago when HTC announced that they were going to be unlocking their boot loaders.
HTC forgot that they don't sell to cell phone users - they sell to the telephone company.
While I agree that carrier control of handsets is one of the deepest dysfunctions of mobile telephony in North America, I think you're wrong about the HTC One X. After all, HTC did disable the bootloader unlock for the AT&T version and presumably would have done the same for Verizon.
Problems the One X has had that have had nothing to do with US carriers and bootloaders:
1. No microSD card slot and no removable battery, making it a trickier sale to existing HTC customers.
2. US customs holdup from the Apple lawsuit that delayed the EVO 4G LTE launch on Sprint and limited supply in the pre-SGS3 period on AT&T.
3. Disappointing European sales (probably due to #1).
HTC has had their problems and made their mistakes, but unlocking bootloaders has not been one of them. Remember, with the recent exception of the Verizon SGS3 (and they've already had to partially backtrack with a "developer edition"), Samsung has had wide-open bootloaders the whole time (and employs Cyanogen, to boot).
You can buy a handset through an electronics retailer. But:
- Every cell carrier in the US has its own frequencies, so you generally have to buy a handset specific to a particular carrier. (The GSM carriers, T-mobile and AT&T, share the voice and 2G data frequencies, but they have different 3G data frequencies. The CDMA carriers share nothing.)
- With most carriers, when you start service you are paying a baked-in surcharge designed to pay for the discount on the handset you got from them. You pay this whether you bought the handset, or brought your own. So if you buy a handset and then set up a plan, you're throwing money away if you don't buy it from the carrier. (There are some carriers for which this isn't true.)
No, it's not the case. Buying through the carrier is the main paradigm in place, but plenty of even "normal" retailers [1] offer unlocked phones, as well as places like eBay, and Google (e.g. Google sells the Galaxy Nexus unlocked, directly).
They just started not having crappy phones in June, so it will take some time for perceptions to change. Heck I have a virgin mobile phone and this is the first I have heard of it(iPhone any way, in June they announced getting the EVO 3d with android 4 on it).
To be fair Virgin started throttling after a couple gigabytes a few months ago, but the throttled speeds are still supposed to be relatively fast (256 kilobit).
Hmm, that may be true. There are certainly a lot of recent locked handsets one can only buy in a post-paid package in the US. In my experience, however, post-paid overage rates can be quite substantial too (plus any so-called "cramming"). Some of the carriers have been pushing prepaid unlimited plans (some including data, throttled after certain thresholds of course) at pretty attractive price points (usually advertised in terms of a price inclusive of all taxes and fees unlike post-paid). It has worked out well for me so far (crossing fingers). There is also the phenomenon where in Asian and European countries people pay the full unsubsidized cost of the latest and greatest phone AND for a post-paid plan. Just curious, what other inflexibilities have you encountered?
Many prepaid plans don't offer any handsets. You need to bring your own and just buy a SIM card. The whole practice of capping the bandwidth is rather crooked, but it exits all the same even on the contract plans.
Ultimately they're deliberately not designed for people who get a lot of use out of their phones, because the point is not to sell them to those people.