Why I’m not buying a 3G iPhone
Since the iPhone 3G was announced at WWDC'08 it seems like it's the new phone everyone has to have. So many features have been added and hardware upgrades as well. I have a 2.5G iPhone and many people have asked me "are you going to get the new iPhone?" and being a geek, the latest and greatest toys are always the best. With the 2.5G iPhone I let my brain take back seat to my credit card, BUT Im letting my brain take over on this one and stop me from spending $299 on a white 16G iPhone 3G. There are plenty more reasons than the financial.
Shared features, improved localization
The 3G iPhone is getting tons of improvements. The App Store, 3G (benched at 2x current iPhones EDGE speed @ WWDC), A-GPS, Exchange support, email attachments, search contacts just to name a few.
So we've got all these great features coming to us, awesome. But all 2.5G iPhones get the firmware 2.0 upgrade free. So we all get…App Store, Exchange support, email attachments, searching contacts. That only leaves us with A-GPS and 3G for another $300! So, we have Google maps triangulation, its not that good but it gets you close, plus no turn by turn directions. However the new iPhone with its GPS wont get that either. So what exactly is the point of knowing where in a 100ft circle you are, I've always been able to get from where I am to where I am going with "current location". So I'm counting that out of the pros.
3G
But the iPhone 3G gets its name from ATTs 3G wireless data network, faster internet, awesome! For almost everyone, this is a huge improvement. For me, not so much, 9 months out of the year I am attending school at MTU in Houghton, Mi. We barely get coverage up there let alone are we CLOSE to 3G coverage, and until ATT bought Dobson (cellular one) we could only get Alltel or Cell One phones, any other phones would be quickly de-contracted for being out of your 'home' usage area. So 3/4ths of my year, I'm going to be in an EDGE only zone anyway. Well, Ill be in a mostly Wi-Fi zone, at home and school I have Wi-Fi and I rarely need the data network elsewhere. So why should I pay $10 more per month for the same data and losing my 200 free texts? If the U.P. of Michigan gets 3G (or good cell phone coverage period) it would be more worth it, but for email away from Wi-Fi, streaming my music from home EDGE isn't that bad. YouTube is the only app I would like to see improvement on, but I use that…once a month.
2.5G still kickin' strong
Those being the big reasons, there are plenty of other reasons I am, and others will stick to the iPhone 2.5G. I bought my iPhone pretty soon after it was released and got an 8Gig phone. I have about 32Gigs of music so my Zune was keeping me happy until I broke that 30Gig mark, and my iPhone doesn't even get close to holding all my music for me. There is of course the argument that I'm not going to listen to days worth of music before I have the ability to re-sync my iPhone. This is very true, but what if I sync something, and I'm in the mood for a different style, 8Gigs doesn't give me much flexibility. To solve this and not care about the size of my phone all together I use Orb on my home server. I won't get into a big post about orb, but basically it lets me stream my Movies/Recorded TV shows/Music and best yet, live TV shows from my computer to my phone (or Xbox 360, or another computer, or WM phone, or…you get the idea). Since orb automatically sets the bit rate to something that my connection can handle it allows me to stream decent quality music to my iPhone while I drive anywhere, my iPhone now has access to 2TB worth of data. Video when I'm on Wi-Fi and audio anywhere.
The only REAL reason I would get the iPhone 3G over my EDGE version is the flush headphone jack. But Im working out the details of a mod right now so hopefully I can wipe that off the pros board. Even with that, there is not enough new and amazing to make the iPhone 3G worth it.