Apple iPhone, YES! Apple iTunes, NO!!

That's IT! I've had it! Done and completely over it! They can kiss my butt....What happened? I'll tell you what happened!

When the Apple IPhone hit the stores here in good old Blighty the wife and I were there. She is a gadget freak and it has rubbed off on me and we had been looking forward to this moment for quite some time. In fact we had read almost everything there was to read about this toy on the web and when we were in the States a few months earlier had walked into the local Apple store several times just to play with this new toy. We were fully aware of the sales history of this apparatus in the USA; it is very expensive in the first few months and then the price drops rapidly. We had also read that the next generation of new and improved IPhone with much faster Internet was less than a year away. We had taken all this into account and still decided to buy it on the day of its release. Simply because we are greedy and because the IPhone is gorgeous, awesome, full of gadgets and also SHINY!

Just like we thought, just a few months later the price dropped by £100 or somewhere there abouts. Who cares? We had already been enjoying our phones for months. It is but a small price to pay! Sure, 6 months after our purchases the new IPhone is out and its Internet feature is much, much faster. I bet it has a lot more new cool gadgets and boy, it is even cheaper than the original. Who cares? Not us, who have the original hard casing instead of the lighter, weaker plastic version!

As i have written in an earlier post, I am a secret conservative and also a little scared. This means that I do not take chances, always buy insurance and live life by the fine print. Luckily my beloved geek wife is a little more courageous, so when she became bored with the standard tools on the iPhone she decided to take a bold step. she HACKED her phone (using http://www.ziphone.org/)!!! That's right, she hacked it! mind you, not to use a different telephone company or anything illegal like that, but just to be able to install some new gadgets that people have developed for the IPhone. Simple things like software for a better camera, a video camera, a slot-machine and a funny little program that measures your walking speed and then searches your IPhone for music that matches the rhythm. Now how cool is that?

She had me convinced and I too took this bold step and hacked my phone. I started taking artsy-fartsy black and white pictures, shot videos and played games. Of course I wanted to store my videos and pictures on my computer and so I connected the IPhone and i-tunes began to do its work; downloading and INSTALLING the latest update from apple! Before i knew it my phone was the same old phone it had been before I hacked it with the standard factory settings AND NOTHING MORE! Gone were the photos, gone were the pictures and gone were all the lovely little gadgets, only to be replaced by an Apple-approved tiny little icon to get easier access to my address book....

I fully understand that the Apple Corporation sells (third party) applications through their web-site and that they make a nice little side profit, but.... IT IS MY PHONE!

I PAID FULL PRICE FOR IT!

What if..... your BBC television, that you paid for, would not show any other channel? What if.... your MGM DVD player would not play movies from Universal? You;d go mad, wouldn't you? Even Microsoft allows third party software on "their" computers! Now that is saying something....

Of course i could buy all the lovely gadgets of their i-tunes web-site, but i have principles and am, lets face it, too cheap. But here is my revenge.... only 2 stars for this beautiful, slim, stylish, modern, must have gadget.....

Apple iPhone  Rating: