Why I Won’t Be Buying An iPhone Quite Yet

And why Apple screwed the pooch last week.

My Treo 650 decided to choke on its own self last weekend and, for a brief moment, I was contemplating the idea of getting rid of it and buying an iPhone.

Then I started to think about it.

My Treo has the following abilities on it:

1. Connection to Now Contact and Now Up-to-Date
2. Vindigo — which I use often
3. Bluetooth connection which I use to talk in the car and send files scurrying about
4. Various games — which I’ve downloaded for free and run naturally with an easy synch
5. The ability with Documents to Go, to read Word, Excel, PDF files and more, and send them in my email program
6. The innate ability to take a picture and send it in an email.
7. I can do the same with a text message
8. A database or two
9. Ringtones which I make myself, easily

I started to think about how I’d get my contacts and calendar out of Now and into iCal, because that’s pretty much the only calendar program that works on the iPhone. Then I thought about Mail (I use Mail for some things, and Entourage for others).

And, finally, I thought about how Apple just last week decided to create an iPhone which did not allow me to use ANY OF THESE PROGRAMS. Their latest update, 1.1.1, not only bricked (which Wiktionary defines as ” To make an electronic device nonfunctional, rendering it as useful as a brick.”) the phones for those who had broken the ATT stranglehold on the device, but rendered all third party applications inoperable.

Then I thought of Apple’s Steve Jobs’ principled stance against DRM for music in the iTunes store. And then I thought about how I use dozens of programs on my Macintosh COmputer everyday that are created by people outside of Apple, and they don’t break my laptop at all.

Then I started to think about how the new iPod Touch has some things just like the iPhone but has crippled the calendar. And I thought about how an iPod or iPhone that is intended to show video, can get away with only 8Gigs (or, 16 gigs in the case of the iPod Touch) and how Apple is making me choose between a crippled iPhone or a cripple iPod Touch.

And I began to wonder just whether I wanted to sign my life away to a company that has situational ethics and large dollops of corporate greed, disguised as consumer concern.

And then my Treo woke up and I didn’t have to worry about any of that. I’m sure I’ll change phones at some point. I’m just not convinced that it’s going to be to an Apple product. It’s too locked down. It’s too DRM’ed. It’s too… well… Microsoft.

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