Okay, Apple. You win.

[dreamshark]

I said all along that I'd get an iPhone when I could use it with a prepaid phone plan. Well, looks like they've called my bluff. You can now buy factory unlocked iPhones on Amazon. Still hella expensive - in fact it takes just about a year to come out even with the AT&T contract plan. But with the unlocked phone you have flexibility. Once I realized that I was going to do it sometime this year, it seemed like the obvious time to do it was before my trip to Europe. With a prepaid GSM phone, you can pop in the appropriate SIM in whatever country you're in and take advantage of any number of prepaid phone plans. I'm leaning towards O2.

It also seems like a good time to finally converge all my devices into one: phone, PDA, music player and camera. I'm currently carrying 4 different devices for those 4 functions. All the devices are small, but every one has a separate charger, making for a packing hassle and a lot of chargers to keep track of in a hotel room.

Still, it's a lot of money, and a lot of eggs to put in one basket (esp. given my history of losing cell phones!). Dither dither dither. I kept packing and unpacking my shopping cart, fiddling around with this or that cheap accessory, trying to figure out where the shipping costs were coming from, etc. Finally I hit the wrong button and submitted the order. Oops. Oh well, that was what I intended to do eventually. *gulp* What have I done???

Comments

[carbonel]

Are you planning on getting a 3G or 4G? In either case, it might be worth looking at the prices on eBay, depending on how squeaky-clean you want your phone to be. If you buy on on eBay, it might be back-street jailbroken rather than factory unlocked.

I'm not sure if that makes any difference in functionality, though.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I'm getting an iPhone4, which does not mean 4G. It's a 3G Quad-Band GSM phone. An iPhone3 would be cheaper, but I want the 4 for the higher-res display and the better camera.

I do not think it is a good idea to order expensive electronics from eBay. I want to know what I am getting and a full warranty. Besides, I have already ordered it.

[carbonel]

I thought the 4 was 4G. This is mostly because I've been seeing commercials for the iPhone 3GS for $49, which very specifically doesn't call it an iPhone4, and assumed they were selling off older ones at a discount. Now I don't know what the 3GS is, because it sure looks like an 8 gig iPhone4 in the photos.

I do not think it is a good idea to order expensive electronics from eBay.

I tend to agree, though I'd be willing to take a chance on something that looked like a reasonable savings (as opposed to "too good to be true").

I have a hand-me-down iPhone3, and I wish I had a 4 for the better phone. There's a book collection indexing app that uses the phone to scan the bar code, and the iPhone3 camera just isn't good enough to manage it.

Have fun with it!

[ckd]

The 4 is a fourth-generation iPhone (original, 3G, 3GS, 4) but not a 4G-network phone. That said, "4G" has become a Shiny Marketing Term that seems to mean "whatever the carrier is trying to sell you this week".

The 3GS is "the 3G, but faster" -- the S is for "speed" -- but the definition of "faster" doesn't mean faster cellular data, just a faster processor and more RAM (which allows it to run more of the iOS 4 features, like multitasking). It also has a better camera than the 3G, but not as good as the one in the 4; I don't know if the app you're using would work with the 3GS camera. The physical design is basically the same as the 3G, with a curved back instead of the 4's slab design.

The reason they're selling 8GB 3GS units cheap is that it works well enough for many users, and they can get the price point down to a level where more people will buy one; the total cost isn't that much less when you consider the entire contract term, but the cost of entry is a lot lower.

You might find a hand-me-down (or cheap used) 3GS or even 4 when the next model ships; latest rumors are September, but they're just rumors so it could be earlier (or later)....

[daedala.livejournal.com]

If you tell me what app it is, and are interested, I can check if it will work on a 3GS camera.

[carbonel]

I think it's called Book.app or something obvious like that.

I know it doesn't work on the iPhone3.

[daedala.livejournal.com]

I found I stopped losing my phone once I got one I really liked; YMMV.

The apps I use most often are Carcassonne (game, paid), Kindle, OurGroceries, and Sleep Cycle. Oh, and P.O. Hours, which maps all the post office boxes.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I already own an iPad Touch which I use all the time, so I know about Apps.

As an immigrant from Palm Pilot I was surprised and disappointed by the low quality of the built-in apps, all of which are markedly inferior to their counterparts on Palm. The only built-in apps I use (other than the unavoidable ones like Music, Settings, Safari) are Notes and Weather. But the incredible bounty of downloadable apps more than makes up for the poor quality of the built-in ones. Whee!

The non-game apps I use most often are Groups (a much better address book), Calculator, ShopShop (grocery list), HanDBase (esp. the databases I created for passwords, vehicle care and yard sales), LoseIt (for logging what I eat),IBP (logging blood pressure) and the invaluable Daily Tracker (which I use for lists, journals and calendars). I use Stanza for reading books.

The games I favor are simple word and pattern-matching games that can be stopped and started quickly. I go through phases. Currently the two that I play most often are Bookworm and CoolBall.