DesignRJC

After reading an article by Engadget, I completely agree with their point of view that consumers should hold-off on buying the Apple iPhone. The reason is with their latest firmware update, it sacrifices many features that catapulted this super smart phone to an all-star status to fight against unlocking the phone so consumers cannot use the iPhone with other carriers. The 1.01 update essentially neutered the iPhone capabilities and only added the Wi-Fi iTunes store but at what cost?

After the update, it not only makes a hacked iPhone a useless brick but for working iPhones that were not hacked it becomes rather dull losing capabilities such as 3rd party / home brewed applications such as instant messaging, gaming, browsing files, voice recorder and a whole bunch more. You can take a look at an image here at http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2007/09/apple_features.jpeg

Even though Apple earns revenue for the service contracts to AT&T, it should be noted that isn’t Apple more of a hardware company with products like the iPod, MacBook, etc? Sure they have an exclusive deal with AT&T but the ultimate exclusive deal is to us, the consumers. Apple’s firmware update could have tried to combat consumers from unlocking it to choose service carriers but with the halt on 3rd party utility and softwares, this is a blow to the consumers. Instead, Apple should be more open minded, embrace the loyal following and support of its avid fans for creating useful softwares that enable to iPhone to be that much better than the next smart phone out there. In the end, whats the point of having a smart phone if it isn’t that smart? Sure, playing music and snapping pictures are nice, but the LG Chocolate phone does that as well.

Apple, instead of taking out the “i” in iPhone, maybe you should focus more on that single “i” so we as consumers can customize and have a choice to how we like our iPhones.