Why no iPhone?
This may come as a surprise to those of you who know what a shameless Apple partisan I am, but I don’t have an iPhone — and I’m still not planning to buy one, even after this week’s unveiling of the iPhone 2.0.
It’s a bit puzzling, even to me. But here are some of the reasons:
- I hate “candy bar” phones.
Every cell phone I have ever owned has been a clamshell-style flip phone. Whenever I talk into a brick, I can’t seem to get past the impulse to raise my voice in order to compensate for the airspace between my lips and the edge of the phone. (Listening to people shouting into their cell phones in public, I’m clearly not the only one.) I’m deeply grateful to the Motorola Razr for rescuing flip phones from their endangered species status, enabling people like me to carry on without the threat of imminent extinction looming over our phones. - I’m not feeling the keyboard love.
I don’t have big hands or extremely long nails. I have enough coordination to touch type, or play the piano in a pinch. I use an Apple trackpad nearly every single day of my life. But each time I’ve tried to practice on the iPhone’s touch keyboard interface, it’s chaos. I know it’s supposed to get better after a while, but it’s just not working for me. - Size still matters.
The iPhone is too small to make reading a novel, or even the Internet, a really comfortable experience over and extended period of time. On the other hand, it’s mammoth in comparison to my current cell phone or my second-generation iPod Shuffle. - It’s all about the Benjamins.
I just can’t part with the kind of cash an iPhone requires. It’s not the $199 for the unit, but the $70 monthly fee for voice + data from AT&T Wireless. Given the rate at which cell phone service is taxed where I live, that’s clocking in at well over $80 per month, or over $1000 annually in fees — more than three times what I pay for cell phone service now. Sliced another way, I could buy a ginormous, shiny-shiny new 24-inch iMac every few years if I tucked away the difference in carrier costs.
Naturally, I’m sad not to have Super Monkey Ball at my fingertips. I’m just not $2K worth of sad, that’s all.
Yeah, those monthly fees are a real joykill! I’d like to get one, but it just doesn’t make sen$e.
I’m completely opposite on the flip vs brick issue, though. I love my one-piece. Flip phones drive me nuts!
The first time I played with an iPhone, I realized there was something inevitable—perhaps even teleological—about it. Since then, Gwen and I have commented from time to time “this wouldn’t be a problem if we had iPhones.” We don’t even have the damn things, and I am already imagining subtle ways it’s going to change our daily lives. If we’ve both always got access to a shared grocery list living on a webserver, we can add stuff to it whenever we think of it, and have it with us when we go to the store without having to wonder “did you grab the list?” Stuff like this might be possible, barely, with the phones we have now, but it would be more trouble than it’s worth.
I’m agnostic on the whole candybar/flip question. My first cellphone, a no-name from Sprint that was approximately the size of a beer can, was a half-flip that I still kind of miss–a flap covered the keypad. So the screen was always exposed, and the phone worked fine with the flap up (for receiving calls or using the exposed 4-way to call), but the flap also made for a satisfyingly mechanical way to answer or hang up, and fooled you into thinking the mic was closer to your mouth (it wasn’t). I think these days sliders are the nearest approximation of that design. A friend just got a pretty slick Sony Ericsson slider, although Gwen’s Samsung slider sucks donkey-cock.
I stood at the junction last year, eye-ing the iPhone vs Blackberry for work, and in the end I committed the heretic act of picking the Blackberry over the iPhone. I got an iPod touch so I could play with the interface and all of the associated toys, and I do love that for mobile web-surfing on the couch, but I also do love my blackberry. And for non-work purposes, I have neither the candy bar nor the flip, but the slider which I love. Tiny, fits in my pocked, but expands nicely to talk.