Back and Forth Forever

The iPhone 3GS is out.  You want one.  You want one badly.  If you buy one, however, Apple and AT&T will take your soul and all your hard earned money.

Out of all my friends who own iPhones I think I’m the only one who is upgrading to the iPhone 3GS because everyone thinks it’s criminal for Apple and AT&T to charge you *gasp* full price for a new phone.

Let us take a step back and look at what really happened when you bought your iPhone 3G.  The iPhone 3G cost somewhere around $700 for the 16GB model at launch.  If you were coming to AT&T for the first time, or renewing your 24 month contract AT&T was nice enough to subsidize your purchase down to a more digestible price of $299.  AT&T doesn’t do this because they want to be your best friend.  It’s all business guys.  Over the course of 24 months they’ll make up the cost of their $401 investment.

Lets fast forward to present day.  You want the shiny new 32GB model.  It’s a snappier evolution of the iPhone you currently have, has more gigabytes of storage, more features, and improved battery life.  You put in all the pertinent information and get a purely evil message stating that you’ll have to pay full price for your phone upgrade.  You scream, you yell, you spew four letter words at both Apple and AT&T.

I’ll put this in perspective for you.  You bought an iPhone some time after launch day almost a year ago and renewed your contract by 24 months.  Like I said, you’re 12 months or less in to your 24 month contract.  AT&T is being nice to some people (me) and cutting us a small break, but no where near the advertised price.  Effectively at the 12 month mark they’ve realized half the investment they put in up front, and they’ll call the other half a loss and cut you a small break to earn your loyalty for another two years.

It’s story time kids!  I went sailing with my iPhone in my pocket about 9 months ago.  Some point between wading in to deeper waters and returning to the dock I realized that my phone was in my pocket and transformed in to an expensive paper weight.  After realizing my horrible mistake I hung my head in shame, scrounged up some cash and bought a non-subsidized iPhone 3G 16GB model at full price. I was 3 months in to my renewed contract and neither Apple and AT&T were at fault for my stupid mistake.

This is no different.  In no other industry can you expect to get a new piece of expensive hardware at 75% off list price.  If you want a new device, expect to pay full price for it.  If you can’t stomach the cost, then don’t.  Apple will have an iPhone Video, or iPhone 3GS x2 another 11 months from now.  I’m guessing it’ll be faster, have more hard drive space, better battery life, more features, smaller form factor, improved camera, true background application support, “One Last Thing”, and cost $800 unsubsidized through AT&T.  If you can’t wait to get your hands on a 3GS then by all means, pick one up on Friday.  Just remember you’ll be in the same boat another 12 months from now.

Everyone seems to have their predictions of what the new iPhone OS will have, so I’ll throw my .02 in to the virtual hat.  The Palm Pre seems to be the closest thing to an iPhone killer we’re likely to see in the foreseeable future.  Don’t misquote me and say that the Palm Pre is an iPhone killer, because it’s not.  I think Roger McNamee went too far out on a limb with that statement.

Apple has to swing for the fences on this one.  The 2nd generation iPhone, or iPhone 3G, was a minor upgrade at best.  Everybody else had 3G speeds and GPS — welcome to 2005 Apple.  Unfortunately for Apple everyone else has quite a list of features that are mysteriously missing on the iPhone: copy/paste, MMS, turn by turn directions, backgrounding apps, a decent camera, laptop tethering, and stereo Bluetooth.  Back to the Palm Pre, I think it has a decent shot at stealing a customer or three but Apple has one thing that acts as a buffer between delivering what users want and what they want to dish out in small bite sized doses.  The iPhone is a product by Apple, it doesn’t matter what they push out in any quantity people will snap it up.  I’ll admit, I was a early adopter of the first iPhone and while it was a technological step backwards from my AT&T Tilt 3G phone it just felt like a better phone even without the App Store and almost-broadband Internet connection.

The iPhone needs to catch up where it still has been lacking some seemingly simple features and here’s what I think they’ll deliver tomorrow.

WILL HAVE

• Copy & Paste — Kevin Rose said it’ll be there, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be.
• Stereo Bluetooth — Another simple feature that free phones from AT&T offer.
• MMS — It’s holding them back in European markets they need this for success outside the US.
• Push — Push technology is useful for IM and periodical update applications that don’t need to be running 24 hours a day.  Jobs promised this to us in September, it’s March, it should be ready by now.
• Premium App Store — The App Store is flooded with garbage and a few gems.  This would give applications a way to stand out and say, “I’m not another iFart app.”
• Backgrounding Apps — I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this will be allowed in some form.  Windows Mobile does it, the Pre does it, Apple has to do it to be considered a smart phone.  Do I really think backgrounding will be in 3.0?  I’m going to say yes, but it’s probably just wishful thinking.
• Turn by Turn Directions — I’d like this to be a standard feature not a 3rd party app.  I remember in 2006 a co-worker did this on his flip phone and found a pool hall in the middle of Nowhere, KY.  My Jesus Phone can’t do it 3 years later.

NEEDS TO HAVE

• Everything above
• New design — It’s nice to match the competition but that’s not exactly Apple’s style.  The current iPhone was a leap forward now it’s just another phone.
• Higher resolution screen
• Improved battery life
• Flash support — okay, the iPhone doesn’t need flash support, but it’d be nice to have.

WISHFULL THINKING

• Play remote library — doubt AT&T or any other carrier would let this fly over 3G but over WiFi it’d be nice.
• WiFi iTunes sync
• Improved springboard — it worked great when we had 14 apps, it works okay when you have 50.
• Improved keyboard — I’m used to it now, but I’d still like a physical keyboard.
• iChat — And it can be ran in the background
• Notification screen — When are my next appointments?  I missed 3 calls but why do I have to click 3 times to see from who?
• Front facing camera — It’s 2009, I should be able to video conference while driving my flying car
• Voice Dialing — I truly miss this feature from Windows Mobile phones
• Email Improvements — it works okay now, but it could be considerably better
• Video capture/improved video — Qik has been great for now but the video quality could be a lot better using Cyrecorder (jailbreak)

We’ll see how accurate I was in another 24 hours.  I’ll be surprised if they don’t announce everything in the first section.  Steve Jobs said they’re two years ahead of the competition two years ago.  Lets see if they can pull the same feat this time around, or at least give us what most smart phones had 4 years ago.

Google has officially announced the first Android phone, G1, which will be released on T-Mobile some time in early October.  I remember when Google first made their announcement that they’d be entering the cell phone marketplace and I was ecstatic.  At the time I was fluctuating between the first gen iPhone and HTC’s 8925, more commonly known as the AT&T Tilt.  Both phones were great in their own right.  The iPhone had a great web browser, was sleek and shiny albeit slow (EDGE) whereas the Tilt was slow overall but had a good deal more features and worked on AT&Ts 3G network.

Overall, the iPhone lacked a ton of features (and still does) that it should have had out of the box.  Thankfully people much smarter then myself did some voodoo magic and opened up the phone to third party applications which were unsanctioned by AT&T or Apple.  The Jailbreak community took off in storm from re-engineering the main screen interface, Springboard, and adding all sorts of useful applications.  Unfortunately Apple would break the Jailbreak applications almost monthly with their upgrades.

Fast forward to July ’08 and the iPhone 3G and we’re more or less in the same place we were last year, and maybe not a lot better off.  The iPhone 3G added aGPS and connectivity to 3G networks around the world, and most of all they saw the value of releasing a developer API to create and distribute native applications via the Application Store.  At first everything seemed great, a lot of people made a lot of money and if you want to use your phone as a flashlight or play sudoku you have about 100 different applications that will help you reach that goal; and that’s where things get sticky, and the Android phones seem more and more viable.

There’s been a bit of nastiness surrounding the Application Store in the past few weeks, which should be good news for Android phones.  There have been two stories that have gotten pretty good press lately.  The first is a guy who created a Podcast program that will download new podcast shows over the air directly to your phone.  The second application, MailWrangler, brings the enhanced functionality of Google Mail to a native application on the iPhone.  Both applications were rejected from the application store because they rivaled functionality in Apple’s products.  The moral of the story is, make whatever you want for the application store as long as it’s a flashlight application or some variant of Sudoku.  Okay, maybe that’s a bit of a stretch but however great Apple’s applications are an outright rejection based on competition is a poor move.

A few days after these incidents caught the attention of bloggers around the world Apple revised their strict NDA to restrict App Store rejections to be made public knowledge.  Alex Sokirynsky, creator of Podcaster has stated that he “will never write another iPhone application for the App Store as currently constituted.”  I’d wager a guess that he’s not alone.  Perhaps this will turn more people to release these apps via Cydia, the premier distribution application for the Jailbreak community.  Perhaps it will turn more people to Android.

Apple and Google are very different companies, at least from a third party perspective.  Apple is about making money and apparently stamping out competition, whereas Google seems to welcome competition and rewards worthy competitors.  Not only will the Android application store be unrestricted but they’ll also have a variation of the iTunes mobile store which connects to Amazon’s MP3 store which provides very reasonably priced music free from DRM.

From videos around the web and reading many tech blogs posting about the Android phone I can deduce that the G1 is very first gen.  The interface seems very inconsistent across the board and a bit clunky at times.  It definitely doesn’t have the polished look and feel that you get from the iPhone.  The interface seems a bit less then smooth and doesn’t feel as usable in comparison to the obvious rival.  However, Google long since embraced the Open Source community and their platform will be free to modify by anyone that chooses to do so.  My gut is telling me to hold off on the first round of Google Android phones and wait for things to get cleaned up considerably before jumping on the bandwagon.

Apple seems to be toeing in shark infested waters by restricting the platform that has made them boatloads of money, Google on the other hand is jumping in head first and the water looks mighty nice… maybe a bit cold right now though.