I realize full well that I am doing little more than giving voice to my heretofore latent fanboy tendencies. If you are a fellow traveler, read on.
St. Steve revealed the worst-kept secret in the tech industry today. The next iPhone, to be released on July 11th, will have most of the goodies that people have been requesting. GPS, 3G, better audio and audio jack, e-mail exchange capabilities (a key to the device's acceptance in the business environment), and, crucially, lower prices. On the negative side, Word and Excel documents will still be read-only, and there is no IM capability.
I don't expect to post anything else about the iPhone for a while. Unless I get one. Then you can expect a series of short posts along the lines of, "OMG, like, this is sooooo cool!"
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3 comments:
Just to throw a little cold water on the iPhone news, the dirty little secret about the new phone is the cost of service. I haven’t heard any concrete numbers yet, but people are estimating between $10 and $20 extra per month for the 3G service. Even if it’s only $10, take two years of that service and you’ve already surpassed the $200 price drop. Granted, you do get much faster service during that period, but people should be aware of it in any case.
One more thing…remember the cool activation with the original iPhone, where you buy it in the store, take it home, pour yourself a nice glass of wine, then log on and choose a cell plan? Gone. With the new iPhone, you have to activate it (with a two-year contract) when you buy it, so you can only pick it up at Apple or AT&T stores. I guess that’s one way to get around people buying phones just to hack them. Again, it’s not much of an issue for legitimate users, but it’s kind of sad that this elegant user experience is going away.
Good points. I have heard that the increase would be $10; $20 would be pretty steep. From my perspective, though, comparing the price with the prior package is not compelling, since I would not have bought the first iPhone anyway because of the slow internet connection and lack of GPS. The better comparison, for me, would be plans offered by rival carriers and phones (Verizon/Blackberry, for instance). Of course, that is as bad a comparison as the first iPhone plan since I'm not in the market for an alternative. I'm the ideal sucker, er, customer: I'm only interested in this one product. I'm not insensitive to the effects of plan pricing, but the marginal increase does not influence me. Much. We'll see what happens if AT&T gets too greedy.
As for the activation, I've never had a phone that wasn't activated at the store, and I would have no intention of hacking the thing if I were to buy one, so that is a non-issue for me. It's a bummer for those who want to hack it, though. I'm a fairly recent returnee to the Bay Area, too, so I wouldn't know which wine goes with an iPhone anyway.
Sorry Dave,
The Blackberry will always be better.
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