The iPhone (Shame On You, Apple)

I recently came into posession of an Apple iPhone. They're all the rage nowadays. I didn't want it as a phone though, I already have one of those and I like my phone. It's pretty compact and the bill isn't too high or at least, not as high as it is with the iPhone (too high if you ask me).

Anyway, my plan was to get it and use it as an iPod Touch that just so happened to have a camera. I thought it was such a logical leap that many people have thought of this. Apparently I was wrong though because searching through Google I found a whopping one other guy who wanted to do this and his question about whether it was possible or not was met with a lot of "just get an iPod Touch."

By the way, that's not the answer to the question. He didn't ask what he should buy, he asked if it was possible. You were of no help at all, people who responded.

Well, let me tell you what will happen if you try this:

First off, you need iTunes 7.7 or higher. I don't mind that at all though. I love iTunes. You download the newest player and then plug in your phone to computer via USB and get a message saying put in your AT&T phone number.

I'm a little ahead of myself. Before all this, when you turn on the phone you're greeted with a screen saying plug into iTunes and the only other thing you can do is access an emergency call screen. That's it.

Anyway, it asks for your phone number and doesn't give you te option of skipping this, of saying you don't want to use it as a phone, or of just having it open up like any other iPod in your devices column.

On a whim, I took out the sim card from my phone, put it into the iPhone, hooked it back up to iTunes and it recognized the card, pulled my number and my plan and said that, while my voice plan is fine, I need to up the plan to cover the perks of the phone with unlimited data so I can have digital voicemail and all that stuff.

But I don't want to.

It wouldn't let me progress though. It was either sign up for this extra fee and move onto the next stage or don't and stop.

So I stopped. If there's one thing I hate more than cell phone companies, it's their common rule that any change to the contract extends the contract another two years without any perks or bonuses. That's bad business to me.

Anyway, I thought that surely there were more people out there like me and found that there really wasn't. I called AT&T and asked them about it and someone said that you CAN use it as an iPod, "just plug it into the computer." The fact that they thought this escaped me is pretty insulting, but once I told them what was going on, they said that sucks and there's no way around it that they know of, and that I would have to sign up for a data plan that lasts two years. I asked if maybe I could sign up and register my iPhone, just until I synched up and pulled my music onto it and then cancelled using it, swapping my sim card back to my old phone and use that instead with little cange to my bill. Nope. Two years minimum.

Shucks.

So I called Apple. They said there's no way around this.

Look, I understand it's a phone, that this is its main feature, but if there was a way to get around this I think that Apple would sell even more just because it has a camera and the OPTION of using it as a phone. I could see good sales indeed.

But instead, I'm getting a refund from the kind seller I bought it from and I'll just go with an iPod Touch whenever I can save the scratch. Th 32gb model has enough space for all of my music and I can just put photos on it via USB instead of an onboard camera. No big deal.

But really, Apple, I would have thought that YOU would have thought this through a little more.