Dear People-who-are-waiting-to-get-an-iPhone-until-it’s-available-without-AT&T,
If USA Today’s sources are right—and how could America’s most distributed-free-at-hotels paper be wrong—you are going to be waiting for a long, long time. The paper reports that the exclusive deal between AT&T and Apple for the iPhone is five years in length, and also precludes Apple from developing a phone using rival CDMA technology (used by Verizon and Sprint).
Well. There you have it, eh? Sounds like you won’t be seeing a non-AT&T iPhone until roughly 2012. That’s just three years before we’ll have flying cars, self-tying shoes, hoverboards and the Cubs will finally win another World Series. So, something to look forward to anyway.
Hugs,
Dan
P.S. Please remember to pick up my dry cleaning. Thanks.
Really--that's okay. I have heard nothing that great about Cingular/AT&T and have no desire to switch simply to buy a version 1.0 phone that is probably going to be significantly overpriced. Not that it doesn't have some great features, but like iPod 1.0, it's severely limited in some key areas and is quite pricey.
As a Verizon subscriber for about 8 years now, I figured to get a Treo later this year and then look at an iPhone in 2 to 4 years after they get the bugs all worked out--but it looks like I'll have to make that Treo last a while longer...
Great features or not, there's nothing in the iPhone that I can't wait for.
you're stuck using AT&T.... unless of course you consider getting an UNLOCKED iPhone from eBay or other places. it seems these days that just about any GSM phone can be unlocked to be able to be used by any other GSM carrier (meaning basically T-Mobile in this case in the US), but in the case of the iPhone, an unlocked iPhone would most likely still have limited capability if you tried to use it with T-mobile (i.e. no visual voicemail, etc...)
"No one chooses when." Unless you have a De Lorean and flux capacitor :)
I'm curious if Apple comes out with other phone models, if those might be able to be used with other carriers.
As far As AT&T, I was with them, then cingular, now AT&T, and the customer service is excellent. Whatever they are doing right in my neck of the woods, I hope they will copy and paste it in their other markets.
DM, probably a lot of folks like myself that are looking at buying an iPhone are current "smartphone" users. and the fact is, everything jobs said in his keynote is correct. the thing that he DIDN'T touch on was compatibility with macs.
if you're using a smartphone, you're basically limited to a device that runs one of 3 OS's: Palm OS, Blackberry OS, and Windows Mobile OS. the only one that sync's with a mac out-of-the-box (as far as i know) is a treo running palm OS. i had a treo 650 and it was OK at best. it could do a TON of things but it did NOTHING well, and it was terribly buggy and it hated having to use the stylus. oh and it also was a poor quality phone too.
my current smartphone, a blackberry 8700, fixes a lot of those issues that plagued the treo: its a much better phone, it does some things very well (email, being a phone... thats about it), but thats all i strongly care about. However RIM apparently thinks that Mac people simply don't exist and thus they don't support mac syncing at all. there are two programs out there to help you out and the free one "pocketmac" really really sucks.
so then you have a windows mobile device. to be honest i've never owned one, but if i did, i would also be forced to use pocketmac to sync it, and that would not be a pleasant experience.
so when you add all of that up, and combine all of the new features that will put the iPhone head and shoulders above everything else currently out there... do i/we HAVE to have the iPhone? no... but i want it very very very bad. it will sync with my mac better than ANY smartphone out there, it will surf the web better than any smartphone out there and it will allow me to do everything else (hopefully) with such ease that calling it a "smartphone" would be a misnomer.
but like i said, no one really NEEDS the iPhone... but when you compare it to a treo, its a little laughable.