When the iPhone first launched, I posted about three reasons I would NOT be buying an iPhone…yesterday, I broke down and bought a 4GB iPhone. So what changed?
1) Price
I have a 5th generation iPod – so I don’t need an 8/16GB+ player – so 4GB is just fine with me. Apple decided to discontinue the 4GB model, so the price dropped to $299 from $499. If you look at other smartphones out there, $300 isn’t a bad price at all.
2) Seeing is Believing (i.e. why the on-screen keyboard works)
One of my original concerns was the fact that the keyboard has no feedback at all. After playing with the phone for a bit, it’s pretty obvious the keyboard is just fine. There is a large keyboard for use with Safari for web browsing and that keyboard is great. Then there is a small keyboard for SMS, e-mail, etc. The small keyboard is usable, but it isn’t quite as good. But when I thought about it, even the small keyboard is vastly superior to the other non-querty keyboards and it’s really not much worse than the hardware qwerty keyboards I’ve used on a Treo.
3) Did I really need GPS? No.
I originally thought I really needed GPS in the phone – and I admit, I think it would still be a great feature with the built-in Google Maps. But after thinking about this for a while, I came to the conclusion that I would most likely use the maps to figure out what streets to take, finding where to connect to the interstate, etc and really didn’t need my position or real-time navigation. I also have a Garmin GPS unit for times when I really do want a true GPS and I have a feeling it would work much better than anything they can cram into a cellphone anyway.
The one thing I’m still worried about from my original post is 3rd party application support. The included applications are decent overall and I can certainly get the job done, but it would be nice to have the option to extend the functionality easily (e.g. adding a Pocket Quicken application). I know it’s possible to do a hack on the phone to make this work (or was possible at one point), but this is still something Apple needs to address.