Why I Have Not Bought an iPhone

I haven't posted in a while, so here's a post.

I haven't been keeping up with technology recently. Although I wrote some posts about the "fighting" between the hackers and Apple, I have no intention of owning an iPhone. Despite the dramatic price reduction of the 3G over the original, the cost is still to high for me to get one, and the benefit is low.

At the moment, I have a cell phone that cost about $100 that I bought specifically for its camera. With a convenient camera that is small and I should always have with me, if I'm ever in a minor accident, I can just swap information with the other driver, take some pictures proving it was not my fault, then move on. The cops don't seem to care about minor accidents, or at least the minor accident I was in a couple of years ago in a private parking lot that resulted in a dent in the van I was driving. They told me that all they could do is say that the other driver and I were present.

The phone I bought also has some nice features like a calendar, but I still use my paper planner for organizing my time and keeping track of that which I need to do. I find writing in a paper planner to be more convenient than trying to type on a tiny keyboard that is not sufficiently large to allow me to assume the hand positions necessary to type quickly.

As for being able to browse the internet, I have not suffered from not being able to check my email during the times that I am away from a computer. I figure that if someone urgently needs to contact me, they can call me. If they need to contact me, but it does not matter how soon I respond, they can send an email. I try to make sure that I check my email at least once a day (which is easy given my need to use a computer for work and school) which is a sufficient response time for most email communication.

Although the internet can help if I become lost between destinations, or if I want to find a store nearby my current location for something I need, another device does a better job in both cases: a GPS navigation system. A GPS system knows exactly where I am and what I need to do to get there. The GPS system my wife gave me for Christmas can also find places of interest near my current location, wherever that may be, in those rare circumstances that I need to find a store I was not planning on finding before I left a location with a computer.

All in all, I do not see a benefit of owning an iPhone that makes it worth the additional cost over my current cell phone ($100 to buy a phone with a decent camera, $0.18/minute which averages to about $20/month for me since I hardly use phones).

As a side note, I was thinking today how nice it would be if there was a service somewhere in the world that provided free encrypted file storage. To make the system feasible, each client would have to have special software that handled the encryption and decryption of the file system, including managing the keys, so that the user does not have to deal with them. To the user, it would be as if they were using a network file server. To the company running the servers, they would be seeing a bunch of encrypted data passing back and forth between its servers and its clients. The client software would handle the keys and not share them with the servers so that no one that has access to the servers can view the data the clients store there except the clients that own the data. The software used by the clients would have to be open source so that people could be confident that the company hosting the servers has not programmed the clients to send the keys to the company so they can view the data.

As for which encryption would be best, I'm not sure. RSA would do the job, but it isn't necessary since the same person that encrypts the data will decrypt the data. The person would have to be able to copy down the encryption key so that if the client's computer dies, they can still get setup on another computer and access their data. The benefit of such a service lies in the backing up of the data on the remote servers. People would not have to backup their data on their own, and they would have the added benefit of being able to access all of their data from any location that has access to the internet without the problems of USB drives (the limited number of writes before they die, viruses, compatability).