The northlondonhippy

I have to admit it, like my most peo­ple last Jan­u­ary, when Steve Jobs showed off the very first iPhone, I wanted one. Badly! I had deep gad­get lust of the strongest variety!

I fol­lowed his keynote speech, almost live via web­sites offer­ing blogged cov­er­age and before he was fin­ished, I was clutch­ing my credit card in awe of this new device, ready to plunk down what­ever was required to have one in my hot lit­tle hands, as soon as humanly possible.

And then real­ity kicked in and the dis­tor­tion field lifted and he pissed all over my party by telling me they would go on-sale in Amer­ica only, some­time in June. As a north Lon­don based hippy, that was no good to me!

I could have imported one, while pray­ing for an unlock solu­tion so I could use it on a net­work here, but that seemed quite risky. Prayers were answered and unlocks were made avail­able, but Apple has already turned the key, relock­ing all the iPhones with one lone update. More on this in a moment.

They said the iPhone would launch in Europe towards the end of 2007 and sure enough, Uncle Steve came to Ol’ Blighty and announced you could get one on O2 in November.

My cur­rent con­tract runs out in Jan­u­ary and is on another net­work, which is no big deal. I don’t mind switch­ing net­works and I’ve done it before, just to get the hand­set I wanted. If I was that des­per­ate, I could buy myself out of my cur­rent con­tract a cou­ple months early, so I could make the big switch.

So what’s hold­ing me back? What’s changed since last Jan­u­ary when I was sali­vat­ing so much for an iPhone that I needed to wear a drool-bucket under my chin?

Over time, I’ve iden­ti­fied a few key things that I would need the iPhone to do, before I switched to one.

1) 3G — for me, this is a deal breaker. My cur­rent phone is 3G and I do use it to occa­sion­ally surf the web, using the Opera Browser. No walled-gardens for me! As great as the iPhone’s browser and user inter­face is, and it looks amaz­ing, surf­ing over Edge at slower speeds would piss me off. And while I know I could surf over Wi-Fi, when avail­able, the fact is that where it is mainly avail­able in my life, my home and my office, I’ve already got access to com­put­ers. Out­side of those two key loca­tions, Wi-Fi is not that read­ily accessible.

2) Stor­age — What really mud­died the waters for me is the iPod Touch. I’ve spent the last cou­ple of weeks weigh­ing up the options between these two devices. The main strik­ing dif­fer­ence is the amount of stor­age avail­able in both the iPhone and the Touch, with the Touch offer­ing twice the flash mem­ory, in a thin­ner form fac­tor. When the iPhone reaches 16 or 32mb, then I would be far more tempted.

3) Installing 3rd party appli­ca­tions — When Ste­vie J said that devel­op­ers could only cre­ate app’s using Web 2.0 non­sense, I had hoped this was meant to be mis­lead­ing and in time, the iPhone would be cracked and hacked, much like the AppleTV and the Sony PSP and it wasn’t too long before 3rd party app’s started appear­ing. The iPhone dev com­mu­nity has been very busy cre­at­ing some very use­ful and fun pro­grams to run on the iPhone, which cer­tainly made the plat­form much more appeal­ing. Apple slammed the door shut on these hacks this week. Even more wor­ry­ing is that the iPod Touch seems even less prone to open­ing up, and this to me, defeats the pur­pose of both devices. By crip­pling them and lock­ing them down to Apple-only app’s, they are being lim­ited to such a high degree that it is putting me off.

What’s the point of hav­ing a multi-function, multi-touch, magic device in my pocket if I can’t make it do all the things I want it to do, that I know it can do. It’s my new toy and if I want to expand its capa­bil­i­ties, I should be allowed to! I take the same risk when­ever I install an open-source or beta pro­gram on my com­puter! Why can’t I do the same on my pocket computer?

That’s what these new devices really are, they are pocket PCs, being sold to us under other i-friendly names! Don’t we deserve the right to do what we want with it and not have the mother-ship brick them with an inten­tion­ally con­structed update!

That’s what hap­pened this week, when Apple released its most recent iPhone update.

Look, I can under­stand Apple want­ing to lock the iPhones to the car­ri­ers that have exclu­sive deals with them. I have had cell­phones which were locked to a car­rier, though after the con­tract period, it is fully within my rights to have the phone unlocked. Apple should be offer­ing the same func­tion­al­ity, with iPhones. Once your con­tract period has elapsed, they should offer an unlock­ing ser­vice, so you can move the phone with you to another car­rier, if you so choose. Don’t worry, Apple, you could always charge for this unlock, do it through iTunes and it would be like get­ting free money, every­one wins!

The other thing this update did, was it closed the back­door used by the dev com­mu­nity to install app’s on the iPhone. This was totally unnec­es­sary and point­less. Why have they deval­ued the iPhone this way? They say its to pro­tect users from sub­stan­dard soft­ware that could harm the iPhone. What a load of crap!

Hello, Apple spies. I know you keep track of what’s being writ­ten about you on the inter­net, even by weird hip­pies like me, so here goes: Why not cre­ate an approved developer’s kit for the iPhone? Even bet­ter, let peo­ple sub­mit app’s to you and if they don’t harm the iPhone, make them avail­able via iTunes. Cre­ate a new sec­tion, called iPhone add-ons, which are made up of approved app’s, cre­ated by the dev com­mu­nity. You could take dona­tions for some, charge for oth­ers, share the rev­enue with the cre­ators. Who knows…I bet there are peo­ple out there in Cuper­tino, who have writ­ten some cool shit for the iPhone that would love to share them with the world! Give them the chance!

Look, I’m going to buy an iPhone, even­tu­ally, but the iPhone I want is 3G, with more stor­age and an open archi­tec­ture that allows for me to install addi­tional app’s as I see fit.

You should open up the iPod touch as well, it shouldn’t be crip­pled and it should offer all the func­tion­al­ity pos­si­ble. Why can you edit con­tacts on the touch, but not iCal events? You can do both on the iPhone and it just seems arbi­trary and stingy.

Apple, I am one of you biggest fan­boys, I have tons of your kit already and think its some of the coolest stuff I’ve ever owned. If I’m ques­tion­ing my pur­chases, then some­thing is indeed very wrong. I should be at the head of the queue to buy an iPhone and I am drag­ging my feet until the next gen­er­a­tion and maybe not even then!

Sort it out! Give every­one the iPhones and iPod Touches they deserve!

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