As everyone who's intelligent enough to be reading sfchicken.com knows, Steve Jobs introduced Apple's much anticipated new product, the iPhone. The Street reacted to the announcement, Apple's stock soared at the expense of both Research in Motion and Palm Inc. The night before Macworld felt like Christmas Eve for a small child for me as I've been waiting for an Apple phone for a long time. When Macworld finally got underway, I sat reading constant updates on MacRumors to be some of the first to find out about the new device. I have to say, the user interface exceeded all of my expectations. Being the impulse buyer I am, I would have bought it that minute if I had the chance. Now that I've had some time to cool off, I'm starting to think I'm not going to buy the product I've been waiting years for. Why not? I can answer that question in one word, Cingular. Apple signed an exclusive deal with Cingular, so if I want the iPhone, I have no choice but to deal with a substandard wireless company. Cingular claims to have the fewest dropped calls, maybe that would be true if the only other carrier was T-Mobile. However, I have enough friends with Cingular to know, upon the purchase of the iPhone, I will no longer have reliable voice communication. Honestly, that's not a deal breaker 'cause this device will be an awesome Internet communicator. I will make the sacrifice of voice for data. Well, there's the other snag. The data network that the iPhone operates on (EDGE) is just barely faster than dial up. So all of Steve Job's talk about rich text email, fully functional browser, etc... is all well and good if you're at a wireless hot spot and can connect via WfFi, but if not, you may as well be back in 1997 surfing the net via AOL. I don't know about you, but I generally only have an available WiFi connection in two places, my office and at home where I would much rather use a full computer for my email/Internet surfing. So now what is the iPhone? It's a phone you can't talk on, and breakthrough Internet communicator with terrible data service. So what's left? I guess it's nice to text on, but that remains to be seen. I'm still a little skeptical of the touch screen keyboard. In summary, if a serious Mac Addict like me is leaning towards not buying it, who is going to pony up the $600 and possibly the additional $175 penalty to their current mobile carrier to break their contract. I guess only time will tell.
1 comments:
Here is the deal, can the phone companies focus on getting the being able to talk part down first? I totally agree, they are jumping the gun here, with putting a supercomputer in the phone so I can watch video over internet and do all this other stuff, but still can't talk on it. Basically, call it a computer, not a phone; phone would imply you can use it to converse which you can't.
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