I currently live in the US and I have an iPhone. I like my iPhone. The apps you can download to it can be extremely useful (or extremely dumb), it works well, the design is great and it’s easy to use. These are the traits that made the iPhone a market transformer.
However, since I’m in the US and stuck with AT&T as my carrier (since they have the exclusive to the iPhone here), there are some serious downsides. In the US (unlike Singapore, for example), the iPhone is SIM Locked. Fine. AT&T does that to all their phones. So wait until your contract is up and get it unlocked. And AT&T does that for every other phone EXCEPT the iPhone. A call to Customer Service blames Apple. A call to Apple blames AT&T. So in the end, the status quo remains and the problem isn’t solved. It’s not like this in Europe where people whose contracts are up have their phones unlocked via Carrier Update that is synced with iTunes. The carrier update is sent by Apple by request of the carrier. And AT&T ain’t doing it.
Of course, if you want an unlocked iPhone, you can always jailbreak and unlock it. The problem is that sometimes the jailbreaking process kills certain functions, like push notifications. All things being equal, it’s best to get an unlocked phone unlocked from the factory.
Which brings us to the Nexus One, an Android powered device sold direct and unlocked. Since practically all phones in the US are sold with a subsidy that justifies the SIM lock, this is a first over here. For the past few trips back to Asia, I’ve been using an original iPhone (EDGE data) that’s been nothing but a glorified phone since there’s no 3G data and no GPS. The point of using a smartphone is to make your life easier and more efficient. So this trip, I will take the Nexus One with me, keeping notes on how useful it can be using prepaid services in various countries. So let’s see how it goes…