It's 2005 all over again.

Back when I started this gig, Americans lived in constant envy of the awesome phones—mostly Nokias and Ericssons—that people were using in Europe. With our locked-down, CDMA and TDMA-focused carriers, the U.S. was considered a handset backwater, with many of the hottest phone trends missing our shores.

It's happening all over again, but for slightly different reasons. Today Xiaomi, the world's No. 4 smartphone maker, announced its Mi Note and Mi Note Pro phablets. To people in Asia, this could be a blockbuster. Xiaomi's done a great job building inexpensive phones that compete with the latest high-end devices from Samsung, Apple, and Huawei.

All of these phones could find a market here. Xiaomi and Meizu would look great on prepaid carriers and force companies like ZTE to really raise their quality game. The low-cost Nokia phones could find a niche in glove compartments or as secondary handsets. But we won't get them.

First, It's the Carriers

American wireless carriers still control about 90 percent of phone sales in the U.S. This perplexes companies like Huawei, which pointed out to me that as firms like T-Mobile back away from subsidies, there's less of a financial reason to buy your phone from a carrier store. But old habits die hard, and carriers have been good at keeping Americans tied to them with tricks like financing plans.

Carriers only have so much shelf space, and they prefer to work with companies they know they can rely on. Chad Sayers, who runs the small manufacturer Saygus, told me last week about his five-year quest to get approved by Verizon, which just kept asking for more tests. Major Chinese manufacturers like Coolpad and Huawei, which sell tens of millions of phones a year around the world, have found carriers' doors closed to them over the past year.

Our carriers have also stuck with their locked-down ways, although they're less pervasive than before. Sprint still rejects unapproved phones on its network. Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile bicker over LTE band compatibility, locking each others' bands out of their phones to prevent them from being moved between carriers. 

With all of this difficulty and annoyance, it's no wonder that some firms decide it's a big world out there, and selling phones in the U.S. is just too much of a headache.

But It's Not Just the Carriers

But the reason isn't just the carriers. There are new barriers.

Xiaomi and Meizu aren't coming here because their businesses seem to be built on ignoring intellectual property laws. Although a complex licensing agreement with Qualcomm shields them from some suits, Ericsson has already taken a swing at Xiaomi in India. ZTE and Lenovo both told me that Xiaomi and Meizu haven't signed some of the patent cross-licensing agreements that they signed before entering the U.S. And the 800-pound design patent gorilla hasn't yet entered the ring. The software skins on both manufacturers' devices have been frequently compared to Apple's designs, and although Xiaomi is pretty much legally invincible in China, it may find a very different attitude prevails in the patent courts of Texas.

But also, like in 2005, they just don't need us. The smartphone market has been growing by leaps and bounds outside the U.S. China has twice as many smartphone users as we have people in the U.S. Looking for a growth market? Try India. It's only the fourth-biggest smartphone market in the world so far, even though it has more than a billion people. That means there's a massive amount of room to sell Indians new devices, especially as smartphones get cheaper and Indians get richer.

And how about Africa? North America has only 528 million people. Africa has 1.2 billion people and a relatively low smartphone penetration of 20-40 percent per country. That makes Africa a prime growth market for low-cost devices like the Nokia and Android One phones. None of the countries I've mentioned are dominated by carriers that control sales outlets, either; if you want to sell a new phone, you can just set up shop.

We're Not (Quite) Irrelevant

I've just painted a picture of a U.S. smartphone market that is cut off from the latest trends and probably in decline. That's not entirely the case. 

We're still big, and we're still wealthy. We're home to some of the most powerful innovators in mobile technology: Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm. We're still a prestige market for established players, and a huge part of the profit strategy for high-end device makers like Samsung and LG.

Our unlocked phone market will grow with time, as carriers back off of phone subsidies and Verizon switches to LTE-only devices that avoid the whitelist-only CDMA network. But I don't think Xiaomi and Meizu are headed here any time soon. It's a big world, and we're just a small part of it. We should get used to that.