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| Yes | 45% | 51 votes | Total: 114 votes | |
| No | 55% | 63 votes |
Yes
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Add to FavoritesIf it's shiny and made by Apple, I'll buy it. That seems to be the motto that fans of Apple products live their life by. For this reason I do not believe that the iPhone will ever go away, but it's prominence as the coolest new gadget will be replaced by the Android operating system.
I have used the iPhone and the iPod touch. I admit that they are very "sleek". I admit that they are easy to use and intuitive. But I have never thought about buying one for myself. There are certain things that I could never get used to on the iPhone.
First of all let's address the price. While the iPhone is still more expensive than most other smart-phones on the market, the real problem is the expensive AT&T service. I own a T-Mobile G1 Android phone. I have an unlimited package that includes unlimited minutes, text messages, and data. The price for that package is $84.99. A similar unlimited package for the iPhone with AT&T is $150. So, if you choose an iPhone you are spending over $60 a month extra. That's almost $1,500 extra over the life of a standard 2 year contract. I'm not stingy, but spending an extra $1,500 just to have an iPhone seems like a big waste of money to me.
The next issue I have with the iPhone is the keyboard. Or, more accurately, I have an issue with the lack of a keyboard. I use my G1 for writing notes, e-mails, and a lot of text-messages. The G1 has an on-screen keyboard similar to the iPhone but I rarely use it. It is much quicker to slide out the full QWERTY keyboard and use that for anything longer than a few words. But Apple refuses to even offer the option of getting an iPhone with a full keyboard. I'm not Shaq, but my fingers are definitely too big for the tiny iPhone keys. Try holding an iPhone and typing with your thumbs; it's not pretty.
But the iPhone has a lot of cool applications, doesn't it? So does the G1. And even the new Blackberry's and Palm's are not coming with App Stores that allow people to download applications directly to their phone. The difference is that with the Android operating system, the applications will be portable to different phones and thus much easier for programmers to develop. The Android app store is already full with thousands of applications, and it will only keep growing since there is a community of developers working on new applications. Apple reserves the right to deny or remove applications from their app store, making it riskier for developers who never know when Apple will decide to kill their application.
For the reasons I believe that in a short time, maybe a year or two, the Google Android platform will be the most widely used smart phone on the market. Every major carrier will offer Android phones, and because of the competition users will have a broad range of products to pick from, a much more affordable prices than Apple will offer.
Learn more about this author, Henry Case.
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No
The 'iPhone killer' theory has existed almost as long as the iPhone itself, from the first rumour of a 'Google phone' to the brand-spanking new 'Droid', the idea of a second party taking the iPhone, and undercutting it with an open operating system and all the specs' fanboys dream of, is enough to excite most tech-heads. But will one of these copycats inevitably take a bite of and spit out the big A?
The fact that all these devices are more or less based on the iPhone is not a point that should be overlooked, sure Nokia and the likes have had stabs at suing Apple over different technologies that they developed first blah-blah, but even those same big-shot CEOs have admitted the application of these technologies into this next-generation device is incredible, years ahead of what any other company was planning.
The fact that the iPhone is still the institutional device that it was when it first launched is pretty amazing. Much of this being Apple's role in stepping up software (and to some extent hardware) as the competition has developed and as consumers grow more demanding. As a result, a kind of cat and mouse Smartphone chase has been in play which has seen each company attempt to replicate the iPhone with a design tweak here and a spec tweak there, but really we all know who started this game, and thus who will undoubtedly finish it.
I could sit here all day and argue each head-turning feature of the iPhone against it's competitors, but by now we've all had a green-eyed pinch, scroll and play with the incredible software which renders most current competition pretty low when it comes to user experience. The real argument here is; will the premium product become the underdog to Androids cheaper, better equipped phones? Well this is just it, the iPhone is a premium product.
The fanboy mentality 'I'll buy almost anything shiny & made by Apple' has a little more sense than the phrase connotes. All of Apple's products are and always will be well made, high-end devices, from the iPod to the Mac to the iPhone, you just know there's going to be a price to pay for silicon of this standard. The high-end high-price of Apple's products is half of what makes them so desirable, so having a cheaper smartphone competitor is not necessarily going to put the iPhone in hot water. The only logical factor that any company could single out and indeed overtake on is hardware specifications in the way of megapixels, mhz, and memory.
But I bid you this, is there any point in having brawn without beauty? 30 million users think not.
Learn more about this author, Matt Fry.
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