I mean its "Half the price, double the speed!"
Apple announced its much awaited 3G iPhone few days back and below is the its homepage ad...
To me, its very disappointing that this new generation phone still lacks some of the basic features which even quarterly priced GSM phones offer... For example, even this version of iPhone can not accept business card via SMS (or any other way than iTuning). Sending and receiving business card is so needed in a business world, I wonder why Steve's team has missed this basic necessity. Another important feature this phone lacks is a wireless connectivity with iTunes. In order to do ANY communication between your personal information on PC and iPhone, you have to connect iPhone with its USB cable. WHY WHY WHY??? Why cant it connect iTunes over WiFi? In this modern world of security encryption, I am sure Apple could easily device a method to iTune the iPhone to correct PC.
And for God's sake, how can Apple repeat its year old mistake of leaving the headphone socket wide open for every creature on this earth to enter inside???
Months back, I faced a problem of ants entering my iPhone and making a safe heaven there like the way Talibans have made theirs in the mountains of Afghanistan... In case you want to know more about this, the whole ant-invasion is documented here...
So, for past few months, I thought they were gone after I sprayed some bug killer inside the iPhone through that headphone socket. But suddenly, few days back I noticed them one more time and in more numbers than before... I think they were busy producing more babies underground (I mean under the circuit board)...
Too bad too bad... Apple failed to plug the hole...
Now, those who bought the 1st generation of iPhones in first few weeks, they paid $599 for it... Apple slashed the price of the phone and till last few weeks, 8GB iPhone was sold online at $399.
Apple withdrew these iPhones from the market few weeks back and created an artificial scarcity of iPhones in the market... Nobody knew the reason and now everyone knows about it! Apple reduced the price by half and saved thousands of those potential buyers from disappointment... Do you think Apple indeed considers its customers so much? I doubt strongly.
Before I share my belief on this view, I would like to mention a recent federal ruling on iPhone and similar issues... Essence of this ruling is:
"The underlying activity sought to be performed by the owner of the handset is to allow the handset to do what it was manufactured to do – lawfully connect to any carrier. This is a noninfringing activity by the user...The purpose of the software lock appears to be limited to restricting the owner’s use of the mobile handset to support a business model, rather than to protect access to a copyrighted work itself."
You can download the whole ruling from here:
http://www.copyright.gov/1201/docs/1201_recommendation.pdf
So, this ruling made it legal to unlock iPhones and use them with any other carriers than AT&T.
Now, Apple has halved the price of the iPhone. Any iPhone seekers would be excited and jumping out of joy to learn that he or she can buy his or her beloved iPhone now just under $200... I wish this was true...
Apple is smart though not intelligent... It brought in place a new policy that it would not sell iPhones without signing a (fresh?) two years contract with AT&T... This means that if you walk into Apple or AT&T store and plan to buy just the phone, it simply wont work. Even if you plan to cancel the contract after you pick up, AT&T is planning to decide about the early contract termination penalty to make your life miserable. So, basically, though the price is cut to half, for those "uncomfortable with AT&T" users, this is just further trouble to get an iPhone... And as rightly anticipated by many iPhone watchers, the price of current iPhones (first generation) have already started soaring high... Now you know why Apple and AT&T stopped selling iPhones since last few weeks...
Another interesting happening about new iPhone is that Apple plans to release it to 70 different countries in coming months. In US and many countries in Europe, iPhone 3G would start selling from July 11 and in months to follow, Apple will be selling to many more countries including India. In India, it has tied up with Bharti - Airtel. Now, I wonder what business model it is going to use for India. In India, no cell phone service providers offer annual contracts. Actually, annual contract thingy just does not work in India though it should. Here, people buy unlocked/unbranded handsets from the market and buy either pre-paid service or a monthly post paid service from the service providers. To my knowledge, no service providers in India has introduced "annual contract". So, it would be interesting to know how Apple will work in this market segment.
Anyway, these days, my iPhone has been a great support to me whenever I have to attend any boring conferences or while waiting for my turn to present my papers... Few days back, in a conference, while everyone was attentively listening to a presentation of an IP based security system, I was lost in playing pool on my iPhone. Suddenly, a fellow next to me noticed that and he too started playing game on his cell phone... Sometimes, iPhones are infectious...
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