10 reasons not to buy Apple's new iPhone 4G

Apple's iPhone is a triumph of marketing over functionality, and the new model won't be any different.

When Apple first launched the iPhone in 2007, it was leaps and bounds ahead of its nearest rivals. But now the handset is a triumph of marketing over functionality. And it’s so ubiquitous it’s not even cool any more.

Here are ten reasons why, whatever is announced at the forthcoming launch, there’s no point buying the iPhone 4G:

1) It’s expensive: Buy the top-of-the-range Blackberry or Android handset and you will still pay a lot less than the extortionate prices Apple charge. If the iPhone weren’t made by Apple, networks would have had to start giving it away on £30 a month tariffs years ago.

2) It’s anti-technology: When the iPhone launched it was cutting edge – now as other manufacturers announce, for instance, that you can use their phones as shareable wifi hot spots, Apple says no. Not because of some spurious “user experience” argument, but because of economics. When will they learn that it’s customers – supply and demand – that should dictate feature availability?

3) No Flash: The iPhone, the phone that promised to put the web into everybody’s pockets, can’t even show you most of it, because it can’t handle Flash graphics. Google Android can, in the latest version (OS 2.2), and it’s going to be available free on a lot of budget tariffs.

4) No multitasking: Tried instant messaging on an iPhone? Oh yes, you have to open the app to see if you’ve got a message. Genius. If Apple announces multitasking next it will be an improvement – but there’ll be no apology for the way it’s treated customers in the past, and no guarantee it won’t behave similarly shoddily in the future.

5) Its battery life is terrible: This isn’t a problem unique to Apple, but look at phones by companies such as HTC – multitasking, better cameras, better screens, all draining their batteries far more – and yet the iPhone, with its undemanding technology, still only offers equal performance.

6) Developing apps for it is costing you money: The special version of the BBC iPlayer, of Natwest Phone Banking, of Eon’s meter reader – developing all of these came out of money that could have been channelled away from a self-important minority and towards more generally useful ideas.

7) It comes with offensively bad headphones: Sit next to somebody using the original iPhone or iPod headphones and you can hear everything they can. It’s another example of Apple charging premium prices, but delivering a dressed up, budget product.

8) It’s not very well designed: Use the iPhone as a phone and it’s not got great reception, nor is it particularly comfortable to use for long periods. It’s a computer that happens to have a phone bolted on – jack of two trades, but master of neither.

9) It charges for satnav: In an age when Nokia and Google Android provide completely free mapping and satnav facilities, the cheapest way you can turn your overpriced iPhone into a satnav is with a £19.99 app. Bargain.

10) Those iPod docks are holding back better technologies: As every hotel increasingly thinks it should provide iPod docks, the momentum behind this technology is only growing. But if it wasn’t for the iPod and iPhone’s ubiquity, there’d be more wifi radios, more new technologies and a range of different options, competing and driving innovation.

- Matt Warman

© Telegraph.co.uk

11) Its made by Apple

Agreed axxxo

I don't know if it's an age thing (and I consider myself to be Pro technology) but I think they have all gone overboard on what they are trying to cram into mobile phones?

God be with the day's when it was a marvel to be able to have a car cell phone, not to mention the arrival of text?

In fact, "God be with the day's of Green Acres"

Anyone young enough to remember the wind up landline at the top of the telegraph pole?







I'd loved to have seen Mr. Haney with the equivalent of a car phone in his truck & the telegraph pole sticking out through the roof


Life was soooo simple then?

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It looks like noone is as young as yourself G

I know axxxo, maybe 30 isn't young anymore

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G my mum and dad talk about that program green something or other

Originally Posted by anto1969

G my mum and dad talk about that program green something or other

Yep, they were very young when they had you too, weren't they Anto?

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