[[Apple]] seem to have made a pretty shrewd move with the packaging of the iPhone. People that criticise the total package price of the iPhone with the 18-month contract of £35/month seem to forget that the contract includes unlimited data usage and connectivity to “The Cloud”. O2 charge me £1/MB for data on my Nokia. With on-the-road email usage, it often costs me around £20/month for just data.

The iPhone, as well as being a cool phone, is an internet device. Well integrated email, a good web browser, Google Maps, switching over to Wi-Fi automatically when in coverage all encourage data. Alison is already reading blogs while in the queue at Tescos. If the user was constantly worrying about the data cost of these features they would turn them off, especially the email which can be configured to automatically check for email every few minutes.

So, the idea seems to be that Apple want the iPhone to be a data terminal. I’m sure AT&T and O2 (and the others) are worried by the unlimited data contracts, and don’t want millions of iPhones users swamping their data networks for a fixed revenue. So, all high bandwidth functions are not there. This leads to the following limits:

• No Bluetooth GPRS modem link for your laptop.
• No YouTube over GPRS
• No iTunes Music Store over GPRS
• No third-party apps, which couldn’t be guarenteed to play by “The Rules”.

I understand, it’s quite simple really.