Ripe for picking

Apple's iPhone becomes more tool than toy

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Readers' comments


nuclear potato

Sir, I hardly see how price "decrease" to $200 as a positive factor here. Telcos that subsidize phones make their customers sign long contracts, with pricing plans that include a fraction of the phone subsidy each month. Therefore, people do pay the full price of the handset over time, while losing their freedom to change carries without paying a penalty. This is hardly positive.

Str Prpn

Radical Montrealer, even at the higher price iPhone customers were locked into a two-year contract with, I presume, a stiff penalty for early termination. So the higher cost to new buyers is just the $240-$200=$40 for the higher data charge.

Joe in Portland OR

The iPhone is nothing more than a piece of jewelery and an expensive brand name. Consumers in America who need something reliable and fast will opt for a CDMA platform like one offered by Verizon or Sprint. Because Sprint offers their data services for a lower price, Sprint makes the most sense for most business consumers. Sprint and other competitors realizes they are trying to stay competitive with the vanity consumers by offering devices such as the Samsung Instinct and the HTC Touch. We'll have to wait and see if another device actually gains some success. I actually think it's a bad idea for AT&T to offer it at a lower price, I'm sure many people bought the iPhone because of the elitist price tag. Now that anyone can get it, it's not as valuable.


i wonder how this article summed up with implying that iphone's choice on its band will dictate the fate of wimax/4G. consider the time difference, seas of companies adopting different technologies, who is going to say nokia/SE/Samsung has no place in the market?at the end of the day people will just be stuffing both standards(and some even for china's 3G std.) into their chips.


According to the Consumerist the new iphone will cost $160 more not $200 less: article says it's $240 more expensive. How is this a decrease? Just comes to show you that businesses are just as bad at subsidizing than the government, if not even worse. Because of this deception and closed nature, I'm holding back on the iPhone and it's whizzbangery. The way they're selling the 3G iPhone makes it impossible to simply buy the device and hack it and install anything on it and use it on any network you want. I mean I really enjoy developing on the sublime Apple operating system, but they way they close it up sickens me especially due to the fact that they were founded by hackers. I mean, Steve Woz (not Steve Jobs) hacked his iPhone on Kathy Griffin's reality show, why can't I?With a bit of patience, new open source cellphones like Android (googlePhone) and Openmoko will allow innovation by opening up their platform like our economy has. Also the carrier I'm looking out for is not the closed up, monopolistic-like, AT&T; but Sprint, which has started working on an open 4G network (that's right 3G is already old) that allows any device to work on it (like the gPhone or Openmoko): google and the OpenMoko development team play their cards right, the future will be them, not toys like the iPhone.



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