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5 reasons I won’t get an iPhone

Cost. If the iPhone’s lis­ted prices were con­ver­ted to Cana­dian dol­lars, the iPhone would price out between $530 and $640 CAD. That’s way too much money for me to spend on a phone today. Yes it has oth­er func­tion­al­ity, but I’ve got that covered; keep reading. Con­tract & add ons. In the US there’s a…

  1. Cost. If the iPhone’s lis­ted prices were con­ver­ted to Cana­dian dol­lars, the iPhone would price out between $530 and $640 CAD. That’s way too much money for me to spend on a phone today. Yes it has oth­er func­tion­al­ity, but I’ve got that covered; keep reading.
  2. Con­tract & add ons. In the US there’s a 2 year con­tract required. The base phone does­n’t (as far as I can tell) include a ser­vice con­tract. I can­’t see that being any dif­fer­ent north of the bor­der. Now con­sider the type of data access you’d need. The iPhone offers many very cool online fea­tures that will quickly bite into your alloc­a­tion. You have to add this. Basic ser­vice for this cool puppy would be silly so you’d want to have the full data pack­ages. Pri­cing on this ‘seems’ (Rogers plan pri­cing is kinda all over the place) to start at $50.00/month. I’m a heavy online user so my costs would be more.
  3. I already have an iPod. My Nano is per­fect for music and pod­casts. Why would I want to have my phone bat­tery drained when I listen to music? How would this integ­rate into my exist­ing iPod systems?
  4. I already have a PDA I’m happy with. My Palm T|X. Same bat­tery drain issue. As well, my PDA is awe­some for doing what I need it to. I have all the soft­ware bought and installed. It syncs nicely with work and home com­puters. To con­vert everything over would take Mucho $$$.
  5. New pro­cesses to learn. Integ­rat­ing everything into one unit means I’d have to change the way I do things. My sys­tem works now for me. To use the iPhone I would have to delete and install new soft­ware for time man­age­ment, and cal­en­dar integ­ra­tion. I have no idea how well it’ll sync up with Out­look (at work) and what I’d use to sync with at home. I run Win­dows PC’s and Ubuntu. Is there a Linux Cal­en­dar­ing app that will work with the iPhone, avail­able now?? I’d need new meth­ods to grab my pod­casts (I don’t use iTunes). How would that work?

Too many unanswered ques­tions. So, the way I fig­ure things. I’d likely end up pay­ing over $1000 CAD to learn how to use a new gizmo, when my exist­ing giz­mos all do what I need currently.

An iPhone isn’t in my imme­di­ate future. Though, I guess if I really want the look of one, I could use an iPhoney 🙂

***UPDATE*** Mar.23.09 I’ve just acquired an Apple iPod Touch. Not an iPhone, but enough of one to make me rethink some of what I’ve writ­ten above. I’ll post a review of it and my exper­i­ences at the Apple store once an issue is resolved…hopefully with­in a few weeks.

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2 responses to “5 reasons I won’t get an iPhone”

  1. chris Avatar
    chris

    I admit I would love to get an iPhone, and I haven’t even seen one in per­son yet. And yes they seem quite quite expens­ive, but I guess it depends on what works for you.

    1. Cost — Yes the list prices will prob­ably be $549/$649 CDN (or there­abaouts). But that is, for bet­ter or worse, in the ball­park for so-called smart­phones. Rogers, which would almost cer­tainly be the Cana­dian car­ri­er, is cur­rently selling the brand new Black­Berry for 8800 for $500. Telus is selling the Palm Treo 700 for $549 with no con­tract (down to $200 if you com­mit to three years) and the Moto Q for $599 with no con­tract ($499 with a two year con­tract, and a sale price $99 for three years). Factor in how much slick­er and easi­er the iPhone could be to use com­pared to the oth­er smart­phones, the built-in iPod with video, etc. and the cost is argu­ably com­pet­it­ive, espe­cially for a brand new product line.

    2. Con­tract and add-ons — Yes, we’ll have to see how those add up and that will depend migh­tily on Rogers. Here again, though, I doubt it would be any more than a typ­ic­al BlackBerry/Treo user would pay for. Maybe less, actu­ally, as the iPhone does have built-in wi-fi and switches to use wi-fi hot­spots for Inter­net access auto­mat­ic­ally when it finds them. I’m wait­ing to see what the plans are.

    3. I already have an iPod — I do too. I’m not against repla­cing it though, as it’s a few years old and does­n’t play video. The iPhone has the cool rotat­ing wide screen, and the new user inter­face using the touch screen, which I’m sure will be big improve­ments over the iPod I already love. Being only 4⁄8 GB may take some get­ting used to for me, but it’s flash, right? I don’t think I’d be too wor­ried about the bat­tery life. I’m not a huge phone talker.

    4. I have a PDA I’m happy with — Does a Mole­skine note­book count? My work com­puter­’s Out­look syncs (pain­fully and unin­tu­it­ively) with my Nokia phone. I look for­ward to killing that relationship.

    5. New pro­cesses to learn — Unlike you, I do not have a geeked-out Ubuntu home com­puter (iMac home com­puter, Mac Mini stu­dio DAW), but like you I run Win­dows XP at work (and don’t like it much). So either way I would con­nect, home or at work, will work fine for me. I would­n’t count on any Linux sup­port for the iPhone. But for me, it would be quite an easy trans­ition, plus I’d be car­ry­ing one less device around with me everywhere.

    So we’ll see what hap­pens in the com­ing months, but if I had my way, I know I’d love to get one.

    Reply
  2. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    Heh, nice points Chris. Yeah, with the price of those oth­er data phone pack­ages, even though the iPhone is com­par­able, it’s still not for me…and I’m an early adop­ter! I just can­’t jus­ti­fy it with the stuff I’ve already got.

    I look for­ward to play­ing with your shiny new iPhone when you do get one (’cause you’ll likely get one soon­er than I do 🙂 )

    Reply

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