Linkstew

Believe it or not, I'm not getting an iPhone. That's right: I, apple fan boy, the owner of six iPods, and recent obsessor over cell phones, am not getting an iPhone.

The thing is, I really like it; half the time when my roommate is showing his to someone, I'll interject pointing out a few of my favorite features [1]. And I'm sure I'll end up with an iPhone eventually -- just not version 1.0 and all of its limitations.

As for the limitations? There are only really about 2 absolute deal breakers, though let's enumerate four. First there are the things that I do with my current phone that I would not be able to do with the iPhone:

• I can't tether my laptop to an iPhone to get an internet connection. I use this feature at least twice a day with my E50, and I'm using it right now.
• I can't connect my bluetooth GPS to my iPhone to get a number of features I use every time I travel.

And then there are the more common complaints:

• It's only EDGE and not 3G. My E50 only does EDGE so I wouldn't be downgrading, but it still seems silly when I can probably just wait for 3G.
• Without a proper SDK, there just isn't going to be a killer app. For example, one of the more killer apps on my E50 is the Nokia Sports Tracker; given that it's tightly integrated with the GPS and needs to record data (and ideally I want it to work when I'm roaming internationally, so recording to the network would be prohibitively expensive), it's just impossible on the iPhone given the current solution.

There are a couple of other issues like the fact that the Gmail experience on the iPhone is crap and the headphone jack situation is borderline consumer hostile, but that's basically my iPhone story. Don't let it stop you from getting one, but if you're an advanced user, it seems like you're going to run into at least a couple of these issues.

[1] My personal favorite is "flinging" a list to send it scrolling, and then touching the screen to stop it suddenly at exactly the point you touched it.