So it goes without saying that yesterday was a pretty happy day for me.
And in turn as anyone might expect, just as the announcement of Verizon finally getting the iPhone after three years of AT&T exclusivity has certainly managed to rile up the fanboys (myself somewhat included) once again, it’s also managed to incite plenty of negative speculation about why buying now might not be such a good idea. My take on the matter? Well, we’ve already decided that both Sara & I will be upgrading just as soon as the Feb. 3rd pre-order date arrives, and here’s why…
1. I have been waiting for this phone for three years now!
2. My existing phone barely works anymore – the battery life is horrible, half the buttons stick, and after seeing an iPod Touch, its opinion of “Internet access” is just plain laughable. It’s almost hard to believe this was a cool phone when I first got it.
3. The iPhone is exactly the kind of mobile device that I need – it combines music, web access, messaging, and the actual phone into a single device, and executes them all cleanly and effectively (crossing fingers on the voice part … I know AT&T had issues). Plus, there are a lot of really cool apps that I want to check out.
4. It’s also not everything that I don’t need it to be – I don’t care if Droid is “technically” the better device! I don’t need to be able to remote into servers from my phone, or customize the desktop, or root it, for god sakes. It doesn’t bother me that Apple moderates its App Store with extreme prejudice, and above all, for what it’s worth I still think the whole marketing campaign for Droid is just fucking creepy…
5. I’m not worried about having outdated hardware come this summer because I don’t think that we’re going to see a 4G iPhone as quickly as people seem to think. Verizon just recently started launching their 4G (LTE) network last month, and AT&T won’t be until this summer, so knowing how Apple prefers to let the technology mature a bit first, I think the earliest we’ll see a 4G iPhone will be 2012 anyways. If they do go ahead and release a new version on their existing hardware schedule in June, I think it will more closely resemble the iPhone 3GS from 2009 that was basically a point release as opposed to new technology at the network level. It still wouldn’t entirely surprise me if they break the cycle altogether, though…
Now it’s just a question of how crazy the pre-order is actually going to be … I couldn’t help but notice that immediately after the announcement yesterday, it took almost five hours before I could actually load up verizonwireless.com to see the announcements on their own site, so there’s definitely some concern that it’s just going to be a madhouse akin to everyone rushing to buy concert tickets from Ticketmaster at 8am on a Saturday morning. Plus, we’re in line for a couple of discounts that I’m not quite sure how they’re going to be applied – I just hope that we actually get to order on 2/3 and don’t end up getting placed on a month-long waiting list for the phones to arrive.
I hope that they’d be better prepared for that given how long everyone has waited, but then again it’s got to be a lot more difficult to build mass quantities of phones than it is to hire a content distribution network to make sure your website is available immediately following your huge, massively-anticipated announcement, so…
*fingers crossed*