Marc Palmer

Can’t help but be a bit depressed by the UK iPhone announcement.

I was prepared to move provider for iPhone, but the pricing is madness. In the USA the same phone sells for $399 which is currently £200. So selling it in the UK at £269 inc VAT makes sense? Jobs says "It’s mostly VAT" – yes but not all. The price is 35% higher, not 17.5% – so only 50% of the increase is VAT boyo. However we’re not going to quibble over £30 or so.

What is more off-putting is the tariffs. £35/mo is not, on the surface of it too bad given what you get in the deal. However I’m a low-user of minutes and I’m rarely near The Cloud. I would likely not even use the data much when out and about, but the phone would still be useful to me in that situation at times.

The final straw however is that the iPhone will not act as a modem over Bluetooth. This means when you are on a train somewhere working on your laptop you cannot access the internet. I can do this right now with my crappy old Nokia 6230, and often do. It beggars belief that the iPhone doesn’t do this and I can only hope this is merely a software issue and a future update will add it.

I’ve seen people saying that this is deliberate because they don’t want you squandering your unlimited bandwidth using a laptop to do normal stuff or doing P2P sharing over it instead of using broadband.

A completely ridiculous argument because a) the use is "unlimited" i.e. there is a daily limit equivalent to roughly "1400 web pages" and this will apply whatever device you use, and b) O2 UK are rolling out their fixed rate data plan to all tariffs soon, and this will inevitably include phones that do allow laptops to connect via Bluetooth to the phone to access the network.

I’m hoping Apple don’t shoot themselves in the foot here by pushing the iPhone just as a "breakthrough internet device" in its own right, and ignoring the fact that quite a lot of iPhone users will also have a MacBook with them! Duh.

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