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Apple's iPhone will not only fail to revolutionize mobile computing, it may find itself unable to compete with the flexibility of much lower-level devices already available.

The iPhone touts eye-catching user interfaces, long-hyped iPod functionality, a big and bright touch screen, and the sleek hard-to-hold design of every other Apple portable device, but at what cost to the consumer?

In fairness, the iPhone does possess qualities making it the most impressive iPod to date. Integration with iTunes will be popular with many and will certainly boost the staggering number of songs downloaded per minute by music-starved users on the go. These features in themselves do not a great cell phone make. To revolutionize mobile computing, the iPhone would have to compete with PocketPC systems, SmartPhones, Palm, Blackberry, and numerous other PDA-style devices. This, of course, will be impossible for Apple to focus on as they have other tasks at hand. This would be forgivable if you could install third-party software on the iPhone - at the time of this writing you cannot. In fact it's the phone side of the iPhone that lacks the most. You'll find yourself to complete large tasks like choosing a service provider of your own, all the way down to small tasks like sending an MMS picture message or copy/pasting some text. If you do sign up, of course, you'll be with AT&T or one of their resellers for a good long while and their data plan costs are through the roof. You DID know that the iPhone is mostly useless without an expensive data plan didn't you?

In short, everyone in the targeted demographic for the iPhone already has an MP3 player of choice alongside very capable cell phones. Pressure from the iPhone won't even make other super-phone developers nervous. It's not a capable cell phone and it costs more than a PS3. If the mobile computing revolution includes locking down our devices and severely crippling our on-the-go capabilities at twice the necessary price, count me out.

Learn more about this author, Todd Mitchell.
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