As I’ve listed in previous posts I’m the proud and mostly happy owner of a Treo 700w with Verizon. I, like most other gear-heads out there, really can’t help but salivate over the iPhone. Face it, it’s beautiful and has a fair amount of cool-factor. But I don’t own one and really have no intention of looking into getting one till at least two things happen:
- I can get it with a true fast internet connection. I don’t care if it’s from AT&T or someone else, it needs to be able to allow me to do all the sexy stuff they tout at a much faster speed than AT&T is providing.
- It has to support all the potential enterprise connectivity I may need in the future. Sure, right now I’m between jobs and doing everything in Google’s realm, which suits the iPhone perfectly, but it has to be about 95% likely that my next gig will require some kind of Exchange / Outlook / Sharepoint connection.
- Optional 3rd item I’d like to see as well is a LOT more storage on it and also removable storage. 16GB wouldn’t hold the various podcasts and videocasts I collect in any given week. Not a gotta have, but sure would be nice to see something with 30GB+
Then there’s the whole Google backed Android thing. I found this article and Rich Miner’s comments interesting. So now I’m definitely waiting till late 2008 to see what the competition is going to come out with. With Motorola, Samsung, HTC and LG all supporting Android, I’m way more inclined to jump on that bandwagon than bother with another niche Apple offering. Not sure why Apple seems hell-bent on again claiming the best also-ran-product-hardly-anyone-uses (now if that doesn’t start a flame war, nothing will). Their closed-world approach is what landed them behind the supposedly inferior, hard to use, unfriendly Microsoft. This time though not only are they going to insist on only their platform, but only a single network provider.
Maybe this time the world is enough different that their strategy will work or perhaps, as I believe, they don’t really want to be the king. They like being the niche, contrarian, we’re-fightin’-the-man product. Funny too because everything Apple does is about them being the man. Who is more of a control freak than Steve Jobs and his minions? As a consumer, I hope they continue to push the others to greater heights so I can buy the best products and only capitulate to the Jobs-mind if I choose to, not because I have to.
Originally published March 15, 2008
