Why I Was, Now Won't, Be Buying a New iPhone on July 11

Being caught up in the Reality Distortion Field (tm) as projected from live bloggers at Macworld yesterday, I'm mighty impressed that the new 3G iPhone will sell for $199. I currently own an iPhone and I love, love, love it. I've never cared much for cell phones, rarely using mine and seeing them as intrusive devices that people use because they can, not because they should. The iPhone has made me appreciate SMS messaging, geolocation, and the true power of a mobile device. The one thing I hate about my iPhone is the "EDGE" network that provides wireless Internet access. It's painfully slow. It takes me back to 1994 when most of us had 56k connections and we'd gouge our eyeballs out waiting for pages to load.

The 3G iPhone rectifies that major shortcoming. And it has real GPS. And it sells for $199 for the 8GB model (the kind I have now). I'd be a fool not to buy it, right?

That's what I thought, until last night when I read two incredibly annoying facts about the new phone's launch.

1. AT&T will be charging $30/month per iPhone data plan (which is required to use the iPhone), up from the current $20/month.
2. AT&T is not allowing home activation of 3G iPhones via iTunes. All 3G iPhones must be activated in-store. AT&T estimates that this process will take "10-12" minutes per phone.

I can only imagine the utter cluster**** that will be the AT&T stores on July 11 and the days following.

I'm also annoyed that I'm going to now have to shell out $130/month for my and my partner's iPhones — that's the minimum you can pay using the cheapest base plans from AT&T. I'm lucky that I can afford this, but it's an annoyance and reeks of old-school cell phone company fleecing that somehow is OK here in the U.S. but is illegal in the rest of the world.

So maybe I should have titled this post "I'll Be Buying a New iPhone around July 20," because I'll probably still get one. But the asinine decisions made by AT&T about activation and the increase in prices really got my goat. Apple was so careful about controlling the launch of the original iPhone, it's disappointing to see that they ceded so much to AT&T (specifically with the nightmare that will be in-store activation) this time around.