As you might’ve gathered from the last few weeks of more or less constant nagging and bitching, I’ve recently gotten an iPod Touch. Despite a number of complaints, it’s still, I fear, better than any of the alternatives, at least for now.
I have, however, been bothered by the fact that in order to access the internet, I need to access some WLAN network – and where I live, Wifi hotspots are few and far between, and never cheap to use. So, my mind turned to the iPhone. Sure, it’s a bit bulky compared both to my current Nokia and to my iPod Touch, but I could live with that. Sure, I still loathe the amount of crap I’m supposed to put up with because Apple think they know what I “need” to use their device for. Sure, the lock-in crap is, well, annoying… But it’s multitouch surfing on the go, with a pretty good screen keyboard, and there are loads and loads of apps.
However, there’s one problem: It can’t be used as a mobile broadband modem. I mean, c’mon! My Nokia is a S40 device, and even it can do this. Connect by USB or Bluetooth and surf away. I’m not travelling a lot, but when I’m away from home, I like being able to use my EEE 900 to surf the web – And I can’t do that with an un-jailbroken iPhone. And I don’t hack my phones, they’re too important.
This is, to me, a no-go. Once again, apple couldn’ve gone for excellence, but chose to aim merely for mediocrity. I guess my next phone will be something kind-of-cheap, possibly S60. That is, if I get a new phone at all. If ‘m gonna be lugging two devices around, a Touch and a phone, I might as well stick to the surprisingly sturdy and flexible phone I got right now. I mean, it’s definitely the best Nokia I’ve tried – 3.5″ stereo plug compatibility and using a standard USB cable for connection were great points when I got it, and they still are. And it’s small. And it Just Works. Even in Ubuntu – when I connect my Nokia in Ubuntu, it just politely tells me that, well, we’ve just detected a mobile broadband device, it seems to be using Telia, and would you like to use it to surf the web now? Yes, I would.
That’s the way things should be. None of this lock-in crap. Not “you need to use Mac to develop stuff for the device, and use Mac or Windows and our poorly-written software to transfer music to it”.
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