The iPhone One Year Later – Captive Audience or Willing Prisoners?

It’s one year since the iPhone reports Tom Krazit at CNET. He believes there are two types of people who anted up the bucks to be an early adopter – die hard techno geeks who love new cool gadgets and smart phone newbies who suckered in at the first “hello” (Media tribute to Jerry Maguire) and discovered all they’d been missing in their pre-smartphone lives. Krazit talks about the cost and the repricing strategies that have boosted iPhone sales and their new launch at $199/$399.

Okay, if cost is an issue, how come no one ever talks about the carrier? Personally, I am entangled in a Verizon family plan that renews everytime any one of us buys a new phone. The emotional costs of moving (not to mention penalty fees) are staggering. Either we have to all get new numbers (no way that’s going to happen) or we have to simultaneously port four numbers to a new system and hope we don’t miss a call since all of us now connect to the world via cellphones in lieu of landlines. And what happens when we sign up? More years of servitude to a new master?

Personally, I think the iPhone is very cool and I would love to have one. (Although it does lack two features that I consider essential: voice dialing and functioning as a tethered modem, both of which my Blackberry 8830 does.) With the iPhone. I love the fact that I can actually SEE the calendar and internet sites and read the email without cheaters. And who doesn’t get a kick out of flipping through and resizing photos with their fingers? I even fantasize that I could make such life-altering changes as combining my cellphone, iPod and paper calendar and traveling and have not only reduced reduced poundage but a reduction of what I call my “radio shack bag” — all the electronic equipment, chargers and the like that I relentlessly schlep around.

Mobile carriers are still working on the old Ma Bell model and they need to recognize that cell phones are cell phones any more. They are life devices. I don’t like being forced into a consumer decision. The inability to change carriers with ease irritates me and destroys any customer loyalty I might have. It also dims my enthusiasm that iPhone works only on AT&T. But until I am released from what my friends Russell Redenbaugh and Natalia Davis call “resentful bondage” of my mobile carrier, I will resist the sex appeal of the iPhone.