the iphone is driving me crazy

call me jealous. call me poor. call me a purveyor of actually decent cell phone service. call me, an iPhone hater.

my beef is not with iPhone owners, per se. some of my closest friends have already made the mistake, and we're still cool. they have simply been fooled by someone ravenous soul attempting to put a new vowel in the simple, Alexander-Graham-Bell-approved word "phone."

my beef is with Apple. why are they charging so much money for something that does a lot of things sort of okay? its a phone, a camera, an mp3 player, the "internet," and some other stuff. i put the internet in quotes because last time i ran a search for, i don't know, anything on youtube, it only brought up like 3 videos. maybe things have changed in the past several months... maybe. but the iPhone and its various features only really seem dazzling because they have safety in numbers.

on its own, the iPhone camera doesn't really stand a chance. if a Canon digital camera came around to take iPhone camera's lunch money, iPhone camera might grab iPhone video and iPhone internet to back him up. "hey, leave us alone pal.. we may be puny and overrated on our own, but together we are a triumvirate of average bells and whistles."

Canon walks away with his shoulders shrugged. he doesn't really care, he just doesn't have enough time to deal with all of those guys. no... he's not walking away, scared from a battle he doesn't think he can win... it's more like choosing to avoid walking through a certain field of prairie grass because you don't want to have to swat at all the gnats.

ok. lets take a breath. "man, Martin, you're kind of just hating on something pretty harshly. do you have your facts straight?"

well, no. i really haven't researched it. i don't know what the specs are, or if a new model has come out. and if its just the best thing ever, okay, maybe i'll never know. maybe someone can tell me and maybe i'll reconsider. i just get so annoyed with Apple, and their constant effort to make everything so hip, and charge SO MUCH FREAKIN MONEY to do it. it makes me so furious. everything is so expensive. like the $600 price tag on the iPhone when it first came out, and now its down to a balmy $300. iPods and computers are no exception to this trend of arbitrary markups.

if the phone was a $100 extra with my free phone upgrade on Verizon come next term, sure, why not. i'd pay extra for something that looked snazzy and made it so in some scenarios i wouldn't feel the need to carry my camera around with me, and could check my email on the go. but the fact that the iPhone is only on AT&T, costs a lot of money (only to fuel Apple's ego and expectation that people will pay whatever they have to for a product with rounded corners),
and is all the ultra-trendy rave, is enough to keep me away.

i still love you if you buy one. i will gladly apply the "to each his own" proverb and call it a night. but if you are on the fence and debating whether you want to pay over a hundred bucks in cancellation fees with your cell phone service provider, just to pay hundreds more for a phone that tries to be everything, on a cell phone network that isn't everywhere, to buy into all the hype, and tell Apple that they can continue to charge whatever they want for anything, all so you can break your gigantic pocket-unfriendly screen, you might want to consider your options.

i'm from the school of thought, a phone is a phone, a camera is a camera, a computer is a computer. separately, they do amazing things. together, i have yet to see those same amazing things. i understand that the marriage of these pieces of media would be absolutely convenient... but let's do it right first; let's advance the quality of the product and let's fix that price.