I like your views, Mark. I am a sprint customer so I am effectively locked out of the iPhone market. It still looks neat, and if I were planning on moving to AT&T with my wireless I would consider it.

I had a choice to go for an android phone, but price was a major factor for me and I could get my Curve for much cheaper. I wonder how the android and the blackberry match up?

and then Apple's recent announcement “Apple Puts Ban on Location-Based iPhone Apps”. yikes, what are they thinking? its a rhetorical question folks. they want to keep that revenue for themselves. more of the same sort of closed thinking.

its all for the best – for Apple. i find the comments here defending Apple to be quite amusing. its a war of the believers against the heretics. nothing more. peeps, its important to know who your friends are, Apple is not one of them. they are simply using you.

tho i do agree that simple is good and Apple is the master in that regard. to each their own.

Simple isn't better in this case. They remove choices and act as our parent, and we get enough of that from the government without inviting companies to do it for us.

Don't get me wrong, I think they offer a choice: the choice to live with their authority over us, or not. I think they have the right to do this, and would not want to stop them. I would also not want to use their service.

We should not be so complacent with others deciding for us. If they had some options set by default, but these options were easily changed, that would be one thing. Disallowing their customers from running various unapproved applications and only letting them use one service provider doesn't protect anyone but themselves. They can suggest only using their approved apps, and they could suggest using one service provider or another, but taking away our options does not serve us.

I disagree with Mark that this kind of practice should be disallowed, but, I also think that Microsoft should have been allowed to bundle IE into their OS. The reason is: we can choose not to accept this authority. Why would people be so willing to embrace more authority in their lives? When I buy a piece of hardware, I am supposed to be the super user of that hardware. This may be a tired old concept, but it makes sense.