cellrater

The guys over at phonescoop.com have a new article up discussing some FCC documents which detail the latestspecs of Apple’s upcoming iPhone and no, it doesn’t have Wi-Fi. According to phonescoop, The phone was originally approved for GSM/EDGE 850 & 1900 with bluetooth and wifi; but now looking at these final documents, wifi seems to be missing. Quite a blow for the iPhone. AT&T/Cingular may have talked Apple out of keeping this feature as well as Apple’s widgets which seem to now be replaced by other Cingular services (Cingular Video / Media Mail). According to an Apple spokesperson the wifi was dropped to preserver battery life.

So the list of disadvantages for the iPhone continue to pile up; $600.00 price tag (with 2 year contract), No 3G connectivity, no removable battery, no wifi, no removable media… and recent pricing plans show a 600 minute plan with unlimited data for $179.99 a month!

I don’t know, I think that apple is really missing the mark on this one. I was really excited to hear that they were working on a phone but now as more information begins coming in I am becoming more and more skeptical about its performance. You have to figure that a big demographic of people purchasing their phones will be teens and young adults looking for an all in one iPod replacement, but with a 600 dollar price tag and a 180 dollar monthly fee, I don’t see many high school kids or college students throwing that much money down on a phone like this.

Business owners may jump on it, people with big money looking for a status symbol but without the business tools available with something like a blackberry it really isn’t as effective as a business tool, not to mention that the iPhone will not be running 3G or have WiFi.

For 300 bucks you could get yourself one of those MotoRokr E6 phones that I reviewed yesterday, not extend your contract, and spend the extra 200 dollars on another cellphone in a year. Or go with a Nokia N95 or something with WiFi and save yourself the money on the unlimited data plan.

All I can say is that it doesn’t look good for the iphone, as more details come in it seems as though this will be more of a pretty/status symbol phone without a lot of logic or technology to back up the high price tag.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.