The New 3G iPhone And Why I’ll Probably Buy One

Unless you live in a cave you probably know that the new 3G iPhone has been announced and is coming out next month. Like a lot of people, I was kind of hoping it was going to be available this week. Even if Apple was ramped up and ready for such a thing, the marketing and hype they get by waiting a few weeks is worth the inconvenience for their customers. (My phone is literally dying and I need a new one yesterday).

I have put of writing specifically about the iPhone because I still have mixed feelings about it. It is revolutionary, no doubt, but it is not quite the savior that everyone is making it out to be.

Steve listed 5 things in the keynote that were keeping people from getting an iPhone: 3G support, enterprise support, third party application support, more countries, and price. We’ll take a look at each of these and then I’ll add a few of my own.

3G Support

This was by far the biggest complaint of most users I talked to. With all the things this thing could do, 3G seemed like a prerequisite to making all those features fast enough to be worth having. Who cares if you have beautiful Google maps if they take forever to load. Same with YouTube and access to the "real" internet.

Apple’s argument was battery life. 3G support would just simply take too much battery. Based on the reported specs, this problem should be solved, but we’ll have to wait and see if real world numbers add up.

Enterprise Support

If you are a hip professional stuck in a Blackberry only shop, this is the feature you’ve been dreaming about. Finally, enterprise support out of the box. And with MobileMe, pseudo-enterprise support for us freelancers and Small businesses who don’t have the need for a full blown exchange server.

A few people online have called the new iPhone the Windows Mobile killer and/or the Blackberry killer. And as much as I would like to believe this, I just don’t think this is true. I think some companies, for uniformity and simplicities sake, are going to stick with their current choice, whether it is better or not.

Because of training, contracts, and budgets, corporations tend to have long product lifecycles and slower adoption of newer technologies. One of the colleges I worked for would often skip versions of software, choosing to stick with familiar software over the latest greatest. Another college I attended switched to Windows 2000 SP2 about the time XP was just releasing.

Just like personal users, companies have contracts with their service providers as well. In order to get great rates on as many phones as they need, they may have signed a multi-year contract on hundreds of lines of service. It could be several years before the iPhone is even an option for them, even if it does everything their current Blackberries or Windows Mobile devices can do.

Which brings us back to 3G support. AT&T’s 3G support is fairly good in a lot of places, but isn’t available everywhere. While AT&T’s 3G may be faster than Sprint’s EVDO, I am pretty sure EVDO is cheaper and faster than 2G. So if I am in charge of buying service for a major corporation, do I go with hip and cool for slower service and more money, or do I go with what is best for the company with faster service for less?

Third Party Application Support

This is probably the most exciting new "feature" of iPhone, but it is available for both the new 3G iPhone and the first generation iPhone running the 2.0 software when it comes out. This opens so many doors for all sorts of amazing software. It also opens the possibility of lots of lame software and possible viruses.

Windows Mobile, Palm, and RIM have had third-party applications forever. Some of them are amazing and have made decent devices into amazing, indispensable tools. Others are mediocre, at best, and cost too much money.

More Countries

With over 70 countries offering official support by the end of the year, I think Apple has hit this one head on. The greatest limitation, as I read comments around the web, is the actual service in some of those countries is going to cost too much for not enough features. Some of the things that Apple sells as their feature seems to actually be something that is only available because of AT&T’s infrastructure (think Visual Voicemail).

More Affordable

$200, that’s what you are going to save when you buy the new iPhone right? Well, sort of. One of the reasons I had previously considered the iPhone vs. another smartphone was because the savings on the data plan would make the iPhone cheaper after about 12 months. But the new iPhone will be on the same $30 per month data plan that other PDA’s are on.

So what’s this mean. It means that if you skip text message, you are going to pay $10 per month more for your iPhone than before. If you keep the 200 texts that the iPhone plan included before, you will pay an extra $15 per month over the old iPhone plan. So at the end of your 2 year contract you will have paid a minimum of $240 extra in data fees.

Old iPhone: $399 or $499. New iPhone with the extra data fees: $439 of $539, and up.

Keep in mind, this is AT&T’s numbers. I don’t know what this will look like overseas. (Just look what they are doing in the UK).

Things I Would Add To The List

GPS – Here is something Steve didn’t talk about, but they delivered anyway. The other PDA’s that AT&T are currently selling that have map support have an actual GPS built in. It is great to see Apple match this.

Video – This is one of those features that I don’t use too often, but it seems to me like it should have been added. I have read some speculation that the physical components necessary to handle video simply aren’t present. Idea! What if we added them?!? But it costs more! If they can include video in $50 phones and free phones Apple should be able to include it in a $200 phone. Can’t squeeze it in the budget, drop the price $150 instead of $200. People would still wet themselves over the great price and we’d get video.

MMS – Again… Every free picture phone on the planet can handle MMS. This wouldn’t be a problem except sometimes I like to send pictures from my phone to another phone. I know that each carrier has email addresses that I can use to send pictures to, but do I now have to figure out and remember everyone’s carrier? Beyond that, if I accidentally send you that full res picture I just took on my iPhone to your MMS only free phone, your carrier is going to charge you for the extra data transfer.

Cut & Paste – Are you kidding me? How in the world do we not have cut & paste? Maybe this is built into 2.0 and Steve just didn’t say anything. But seriously, this should have been included day one and it should have been demoed at the keynote.

Time to Buy

I still don’t think the iPhone is quite perfect. But with MobileMe and what they have added, I just can’t help myself. So what do you think? Are you going to hold out for a few more fixes or are you in as soon as possible?

Tags: iPhone, 3G