So being 22 and all into this tech crap, I checked out what I could find…
5 year EXCLUSIVITY CONTRACT?! Sorry… guess you need AT&T or you won’t have it before 2012!
500/600 bucks? Um… that’s… um… well if you can afford dimples.
What the hell does service cost? I know is only can run on the mid speed Edge connection and it still can’t use the 3G or whatever super high speed internet, but does anyone else wonder what kind of contract you may have to sign with AT&T to get one of these things.
There are expected to be lines around the block for these… they’re the next XBox or PS3
I wonder just how much smaller and nicer they will be in 5 years… hell what will replace i in 5 years?! Remember the 1st Generation Ipod? and now… nano, movie, mini, dimpled, platinum…
Again… it’s pretty amazing when i think about the potential of tech crap i will see in my lifetime. I remember just 10 years ago, Apple computers with black screens and green text, Comador 64 which ran on tapes, THE FLOPPY DIST, Beepers!, The Zack Morris (HUGE) Cell Phone, and the first Sony Portable CD Player (150 dollars) which everyone hooked up in their cars because that wasn’t a stock option at the time.
How about Jazz-drives and Zip-drives? I still have an f-ing zip drive on my G4 only b/c it was what all the university’s computers had, so if I wanted to work on anything at home and at school, I needed to save it to a zip disk.
I’m amazed I made it through school without ever using a zip disk. I remember the computers in the labs ALL had zip disc drives, but I never saw anyone really using them I guess.
I don’t think most of that stuff was 10 years ago,
I thought he was about a decade off, but I get the point. “Colecovision”…WOW!!! That was pretty obscure. I think I remember that had to come out because of the new Atari format…the leap from the 2600 to the 5200. Intellivision is still where it’s at as far as I’m concerned!
So besides the 5yr exclusivity to AT&T, obviously they’re going to rope you into a service contract and the rumor mill says that’ll be a 2-year contract. Even for current AT&T customers, that’ll be another 2 year contract please! And you probably won’t get away with anything less than $40/month for voice + mandatory internet/data service that they’re going to force on you. Along with that there are the rumors that it’s absolutely, positively ONLY going to work with AT&T service, especially a feature like video voicemail. But, as with any new gadget – just give it a little time and the hacks will surface and the phone will undoubtedly be unlocked to be used on another carrier. I can’t wait to see what the “creative” people will come up with …what programs or operating systems will eventually run on the iPhone. A noteable hole in the feature set is iChat or any AOL chat client built-in. Possibly that will come later in an upgrade officially from Apple, but very likely people will figure out how to make it work on there anyways.
It’s certainly a cool piece, but I’ll gladly wait for v.2 or later – features/storage will certainly improve (hello, how 'bout some GPS!) and price will drop. Wait, that would require me to switch to AT&T. Nevermind, then I’ll also wait until I can pop in my T-Mobile SIM. Hopefully, that won’t be a 5-year wait…
At the time Zip and Jazz drives were brilliant - replacing the old Syquest drive and Iomega’s old Bernoulli drive. Jazz died fairly early. Zips held on for quite awhile, jumping their size from 100 MB to 250 MB, but finally succumbed to JumpDrives (Removable Flash Memory Storage Devices).
I still keep a Zip drive around in case my network between my Mac and PC goes down - I still have sneakernet.
I’m with you. Much more interested in the clones that will be coming out than with the actual iPhone. FWIW, I think the touchscreen type of interface will be revolutionary and we’ll see the majority of mobiles adopting it in the very near future.
We have Zip AND Jaz drives at our house. Sitting on the shelf. Along with several stacks of disks for them. One disk, as I recall, cost more than my monthly paychecks for my work study job… And now I just got a 4G USB thumb drive for $50. Amazing.
No iPhone here.
So, is anyone more or less likely to get that iPhone now based on the plans above? And activation is done at home, on your computer, via iTunes…that’s pretty slick.
