My 3G iPhone Thoughts
When the iPhone was announced last year I wanted one, but didn’t get one. Why? The price. Even the price cut two months later couldn’t sway me to get one. At that point the allure had worn off. Reports from the street were in and the iPhone was great, but not perfect. At that point I decided to wait for the second generation iPhone. So I waited… and wait… impatiently if you ask my family.
This week Steve Jobs announced the 3G iPhone. It’s a definite improvement from the first generation iPhone, but it’s still has it’s imperfections. Well, imperfections we need to guess based on reading between the line. You know, the things that Steve Jobs didn’t mention: copy and paste, video recording, etc.
One of the big announcements was the price cut to $199 for the 8 GB model and $299 for the 16 GB model. The stories quickly came out that the price savings will be erased by the addition $10 per month AT&T will charge for the unlimited data plan. Umm, okay but when someone purchased a first generation phone at the hire price, either the original price ($499/$599) price or the discounted price two month later, they still had to pay for an unlimited data plan, right? Sure that data plan cost $10 less per month, but they paid a lot more for the phone in the first place and still had to pay $60 a month. I’m not a mathematician but the new pricing doesn’t add up to the cost of using a first generation iPhone.
The 3G iPhone will have a lot going for it, such as 3G (not an issue for me here in farmland, see the 3G coverage map below where blue depicts 3G), GPS and iPhone apps. Plus the enterprise support, specifically Cisco VPN and Exchange, two technologies that I use at my day job. Hurray.
Is this enough to get me to finally buy one? Yep. I would have purchased one on June 9th if they were available. Even after the keynote hangover, followed by all the sobering bad news (such as the data plan price increase).
One last note: a shout out to GeekBrief.tv, Engadget and Gizmodo for their live coverage of the keynote. GeekBrief.tv was able to get a live audio feed of they keynote which they provided through their studio. Thanks!
-Al
AT&T 3G Coverage Map (Blue designates 3G coverage)
