If you haven’t been living under a rock these past few months, you’ve undoubtedly heard of the Apple iPhone set to be released on June 29^th 2007.

You’ve probably seen the commercials showing off its innovative features and maybe even visited Apple’s website to learn about everything it can do in detail.

I have to say that as much as I like cool toys, I won’t be buying an Apple iPhone.

Here’s why:

Yes, does it make calls?

I don’t know about you, but for me the most important thing I need to do with a phone is… drum roll please… make phone calls. If you’ve seen the commercials the fact that the iPhone is actually a phone is downplayed. Sure, you can get on the Internet and surf using a real full featured web browser and you can listen to iTunes, and you can watch videos and movies as well.

However, I like most people, primarily use my phone to make phone calls. Once in a while I send a text message or use the voice recorder (does the iPhone even have that), but that’s about it. I have owned smartphones in the past and never really found all the extra features that useful.

Lack of buttons

In order to make the phone as simple as possible, there is only one real button on the phone. Everything else is on the touch screen. This makes the phone simple, but means whenever you need to do something you’re going to need to look at the screen. You may say that you typically look at your screen anyway, but do you? I know that I can get my phone out and speed dial several people without ever having to look at the screen with my current phone. I can change the ringer from loud to vibrate without ever opening up the phone or taking it out of my pocket. I can record a memo to myself by pressing a single button.

On the iPhone to do all of these thing I would need to get the phone out and activate the screen, and then find the button that takes me to the menu that performs that task and since a touch screen provides no tactile feedback for me to “feel” my way around it’s keyboard, I would almost certainly need to be looking at the phone to make sure that I’m really changing my ringtone instead of playing Pulp Fiction.

iTunes are Great but…

I got an iPod for Christmas last year and I have to say that I really do like iTunes and the iPod, and you’d think that I would think that since the iPhone works with iTunes I’d consider it an iPod replacement.

The truth is that I use my iPod mainly when I’m at the gym. Besides the fact that you’d look like a major tool walking around listening to music from your iPhone, it’s just not a practical device at the gym or if you’re out running – it’s too big. For music, I’ll take my iPod Nano over the iPhone any day.

I will admit that being able to watch movies and TV shows is pretty cool, and for plane flights, that would be an awesome feature to have, but I don’t travel as much as I used to so it’s really not the useful to me since when I’m at home I have TVs I can watch and when I’m driving I can’t really watch TV anyway. And even if I’m on a plane, a laptop will do the same job better anyway.

The Deal Killer

While the iPhone is fairly pricey, that wasn’t ultimately a deal killer for me, the real deal killer is the fact that they signed and exclusive agreement with AT&T so the phone is only available on one network. Even if I wanted an iPhone I couldn’t get one – not because AT&T doesn’t have coverage in my city but because I live in one of their “dead spots” in my town. And I need to be able to get phone calls in my house.