the Unexpressed Advantage

The following is a response to Jeremy's post on the ipod as well as his request for me to link to his blog from this site. Jer, if you can come up with a reasonable and thoughtful response to my arguments here then I’ll link to your blog (which, by the way, has nothing to do with whether I'm a "good friend" or not).

The iphone is coming out on June 29. A lot of hype has been built up over this event; a lot of people are willing to do all kinds of things to get their hands on one. Based on the current available information though, I think it's an unwise decision. Here are at least 10 good reasons why you should hold off for at least 6 months to a year to buy an iphone.

10 – Way Overpriced

Apple is charging $499 for a 4GB and $599 for a 8GB iphone with a 2 year AT&T contract. If you want to buy one at retail, it's $999 – and that may or may not be unlocked.¹ See also – you can buy a great laptop AND a cell phone for this price. Apple is going to charge the early adopters an arm and a leg simply because they can.

9 – 1st Generation Apple Product

Anyone whose been a long-time user of Apple knows to stay away from first-gen Apple products. They are always a headache. Wait until it gets good and cheap. You could probably say that the ipod is an exception to this, but if you consider the current ipods compared to the first generation brick of an ipod I think the point stands.

8 – Locked into AT&T

I like AT&T (or Cingular, or whatever it is now). But I hate contracts. And you're looking at a $40+ a month cell-phone bill plus a $40+ a month data plan just to use the darn thing. Your iphone just got expensive.

7 – No GPS

My buddy Kyle lives in San Francisco. He has a neat little LG phone which cost him about $4. It always knows where he is. When he's lost in the city he tells his phone, "home", and it starts talking and proceeds to give him directions home. The iphone will have google maps but no GPS. For this to be the communications / internet device that they're touting it to be, It really oughta have GPS.

6 – No Keyboard

Ok, here's a fun little game. It's called Typing on Nothing. Start by typing out some fun phrase on your keyboard. Now remove the keyboard and imagine that the letters are in front of you on your desk. Now type onto your desk the same fun phrase. How did that feel? A little confusing? Not sure where the letters were? Your fingers get a little bit lost? Yeah. The iphone has a virtual keyboard on the screen. It's going to make text messaging way less fun.

5 – Not Enough Memory

We've already discussed how you can't play your music with a dead battery, but you also can't play your music when it's not on your iphone. Although Some people can get by on 8GB of memory, most ipod users prefer the bigger hard drives of the 30GB video models. So if the iphone is meant to replace your ipod, it should work pretty well, except that when you want to listen to an artist that's not on your iphone you'll still have to pull out your trusty ipod, which surprisingly will have a fully charged battery, unlike your iphone.

4 – Alternative Smart Phones

Depending on what you want to do, there are several other smart phones on the market that will and already do compete well with the iphone. We're not talking about the Spurs vs. Cavs here. The iphone is the new contender and it has everything to prove.

3 – The neurotic factor

Once you drop $999 for the phone, $189 for chargers, $50 for case, and so on and so on, do you really think you're going to let anyone else touch your iphone, let alone even look at it? Not likely. Too much pressure for me to handle.

2 – Battery Life

This one is obvious. When you take a normal ipod and add the battery requirements of a phone (which is a radio transmitter/receiver), as well as normal music listening use and the occasional video podcast or downloaded tv show, you're probably looking at a total battery life of about… ...oh, I don't know, maybe 3 hours? Let's see, the normal work day is about 8 hours, plus lunch, plus drive to and from work, 10 hours. So assuming you charge it all night, drive to work, make a moderate amount of phone calls, listen to a little music, and maybe watch cnn (and you can't say that you wont watch cnn because that's why you bought the darn thing, it's an everything device), odds are good that on the ride home your ipod is dead which means you can't listen to any of your music or receive any phone calls (at least you don't have to stop at the store now). No problem, just pop in your spare battery and you're good to go – OH WAIT! that's right, there is no option of putting in a spare battery. So yeah, you're hosed, which means that you're going to need to buy at least a spare charger for work and the car, each of which costs $39. OH WAIT! No they're actually going to cost $89 because Apple can charge you whatever they want (see #1 above). After about 6 months of this your iphone's memory-destroyed Li-Ion battery will now have a 1 hour life which means you'll be shipping it off to Apple to pay $100 to have the battery replaced, only to start the whole thing over again.

1 – Not the all in one device you think it is

The iphone is being touted as an all-in-one internet, phone, and music device. But the truth is, are you really going to want to browse on it? Probably not, you'll probably use your laptop instead. Are you really going to want to use it for music? You'll probably just use your current ipod AND you're seriously not going to strap an iphone to your arm to play basketball like I do with my nano. How 'bout watching movies & tv shows? Not for very long, I once purchased this little device, which has the same size screen and color-depth as the iphone, in order to watch movies while exercising and on airplanes. It was just too small. I took it back inside of a month. Watching movies on a laptop – great.

I’m not saying the iphone isn’t going to be good, it is – eventually. But in the beginning people are going to be paying a great deal of money for something that they will end up being very frustrated with. It’s kind of like the Cavs this year. They show a lot of promise. They have the perennial star of the next generation. But right now, this year, they’re just not mature enough and deep enough to beat a championship team like the Spurs. The iphone will be great one day. Just not on June 29th.

1. unlocked means that you can use the phone with your current cell-phone service provider or any other provider [ƒ]