Here’s all you have to do to update early:

(edit 1: I added a new first step, to first install iTunes 10.5 Beta 7 or higher)
(edit 2: Plug directly into the computer – don’t use a USB extension cable as this can slow the backup/restore down a LOT)
(edit 3: Want the official release now? Download the latest iPhone ISPW and repeat steps 2 and then 5-7 below – 8 id needed)

1. Install iTunes 10.5 beta 7 or higher (Win 32, Win 64, or MAC OS X)
2. Sync your device and run a backup.
3. Download the file you need from the list below. It’s around 800MB, so it’ll take a while.
iPhone 4 (GSM)
iPhone 4 (CDMA)
iPhone 3GS
iPad 2 (Wi-Fi)
iPad 2 (Wi-Fi + 3G GSM)
iPad 2 (Wi-Fi + 3G CDMA)
iPad 1 (All)
iPod touch (3G)
iPod touch (4G)

4. Extract the file you downloaded. I suggest using 7Zip if you’re on a PC. Find it at Download.com
5. Hold down SHIFT (or “Option” on a MAC) and click “Restore” in iTunes
6. A file selection box should open up. Choose the ISPW file that you extracted from the DMG file you downloaded.
7. iTunes will wipe your device and install IOS5. That’s OK.
8. After the install, it should ask if you want to restore from a backup. Say YES and choose your backup from Step 1.

Thanks to this guide for the tips.

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On the surface, the Mac App Store is really just an extension of Apple’s existing App Store for their iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad devices. While that may sound like no big deal, there’s a reason the image above (from the Apple site) is exploding with excitement and had a file name that included the word “hero” (no joke). In one move, Apple has both consumers and software developers excited again and may have changed the way we deal with software from now on.

What It Means For Consumers

Consumers now have a single place to find, view, rate, and purchase software for their Macs. While I’m still a PC guy, I fell in love with the App Store for my iPhone. I have had several Windows Mobile phones and finding and installing software was always more expensive and cumbersome at best. Moving to the iPhone I found myself with more software (apps) than I could handle and the best part is that the competition brings the bar way down for pricing. I suspect we’ll see the same with the Mac App Store. With titles like Turbo.264 HD and iMovie 11 in the App store, competition will surely bring down prices for full fledged apps as well. Even those outside of the app store will need to remain competitive to stay in the game. Maybe we’ll see some of the $400 apps come down in price for the rest of us.

What does it mean for those of us using Windows? Hopefully, like the iPhone did for Android, this will nudge a PC App Store into the works. There’s already things like Download.com and there’s Adobe Air, but there’s no competitive one-stop shop for Windows software and I think it’s only a matter of time. Adobe, in particular, is in a good position to strike. They have a good platform with Air and as more people use it, a marketplace like Apples App Store makes a lot of sense. If you build it (and it’s done right), they will come.

What It Means For Developers

The Mac App Store can be a blessing for small developers and a bit of a curse for the big ones. As mentioned before, this is sure to drive more competitive pricing for Mac software. It will also force more developers to think outside the box, add more features, respond to requests, etc. The competitive marketplace will really keep developers on their toes. But that’s a good thing, too. Software that might otherwise go unnoticed will now have an instant audience and when Apple features an app, it’s like the Oprah effect, driving sales through the roof. Mac Apps that work well and offer all the features people want at a competitive price will now need a much smaller advertising budget. The people will find them and the cream will rise to the top, especially if it’s an addictive game for under five bucks.

What It Means For The Software Industry

This is the part I’m not really sure of yet, but I have some predictions and some fears. One thing I don’t want to see is Apple turning their Mac computers into giant iPhones. They did this with the iPad, restricting installs to those accomplished through the App Store, and it’s OK for what the iPad is. A Macintosh computer, on the other hand, needs to keep its freedom. I envision Apple trying to lock Macs down to only Apps from the Mac App Store and that would be a huge mistake. Know your limits, Mr. Jobs.

As for the industry as a whole, I think it could use a push in this direction. A centralized marketplace that becomes THE place for everyone to turn for software (Mac AND PC) will bring with it the competitive advantages mentioned above. Again, I wouldn’t want it to be the only place to get software, but it would be my first stop and a nice option.

On my PC I’m running the latest version of iTunes and it offers no Mac Apps. If you’re on a Mac and have installed anything from the new Mac App Store, I’d love to know your opinions and experience in the comments below.

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Buying Online Is Cheaper

My wife had poked around looking at prices and found that Best Buy had a decent price ($354.99) on the 64GB iPod Touch (3rd Generation) she wanted. She called me up and we agreed to head over there before dinner. After work, I picked her up and we went to the Best Buy to find that they had her iPod, but in the store, it was the same price as at the Apple store and other retailers. At $399.99, it was $45 more than we expected. While that’s not going to break the bank, I’m not eager to throw away $45. So I pulled out my iPhone, loaded up the Best Buy web site, and found the same product in the online store for the price she saw earlier in the day. Then I noticed the “Online only price” in red letters near the price. Although I found a way around that at that moment, it wasn’t until today that I noticed that the product listing on the FULL version of the site did not have this “online only price” notice like the mobile version of the site, which seems a little tricky to me, but is likely just a mistake.

(Click either image below to see the full size)

Full Site	Mobile Site

How We Saved Money

Not one to just give up, I asked the employee working the MP3 player section if we could just buy online and then use the in-store pick up option. As I was showing him the price online on my iPhone, he pointed out the “online only” notice and said that he was pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to but we could check with customer service. Of course, we checked with customer service and they said we could. At my request, she was nice enough to check inventory and let us know there were plenty in the store to buy, so we bought one using my iPhone. There’s a 45 minute wait for the order to be completed and brought to the pickup area, so we went to dinner and came back to complete a purchase, having saved the money we had hoped to save.

Knowing what we now know, we would have placed the order from a computer at home just because it’s faster and easier to fill out all the information, but otherwise, it was a pretty painless experience and we never even had to try and convince anyone we should get the online price or have any uncomfortable discussions about why the price is different. And really, I understand the reasoning but was pleased to find a way to have my cake and eat it, too.

What’s The Lesson Here?

Although this is specific to our scenario at Best Buy with this product, the lesson to be learned extends to any consumer activity and could be applied to car purchases easily. Don’t be afraid to look for ways to get the price you want. There’s no reason to not look at your purchase from every angle, compare prices, and ask questions. You never know when it’ll save you a few bucks.

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Google Maps

One of the original built-in applications in the iPhone’s OS is the Google Maps app. With it, you can quickly search for your destination and map your route to get there. With your trip all mapped out, you can relax and just check in once in a while for any freeway changes or other details. Of course I’m still waiting for Google to give us turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone for free (yes, I AM that spoiled by Google), but there’s a few (not free) apps out there to try as well. I use Google because it’s incredibly simple and I can jump right to street view to see what the building I’m looking for looks like.

Pandora

My favorite source for streaming music on the web is also my favorite source on my iPhone. What I didn’t know was how useful it could really be on a road trip. I intended to make a note of where in the desert it stopped working, but it just kept working the whole time. Other than a couple times cutting out for about 30 seconds, Pandora streamed brilliantly over AT&T’s 3G network the entire drive. Now if AT&T could just get my phone to reliably make phone calls where I need it to…

Email

Another standard app on most smart phones is an email application and the iPhone has a pretty complete email program and it handles multiple accounts. The thing that I used to hate is coming back home to find thousands of emails to go through. This weekend, I was able to keep up with my two important email accounts and respond to people in a timely manner while removing all the spam from my server to only sync valuable emails when I get home.

TweetDeck

While I tried to enjoy my vacation more than Twitter, I still have thoughts and photos I want to share while out of town. Vacations also offer lots of fun things to tweet about. I’ve tried a few of the top Twitter iPhone apps, but this one is my favorite. Just waiting in line for tickets to the aquarium, I was able to check for new tweets, mentions, and DMs and reply to a couple in just a couple minutes. Then I globally marked the rest as “read”. Easy.

Weather

It’s always important to know the weather where you’re going, and if you’re on a long road trip, this can be tricky. When we drove to Detroit and back last summer, we passed through several states and the weather app was very useful to plan out our wardrobe as well as touristy events.

Safari

Despite the completely unexplainable fact that I still can’t view flash in a web site in Safari on my iPhone, it’s still a great browser. It’s pretty fast and renders very nicely. Best of all, it’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to a real web browsing experience on a phone (except sites with flash). Wireless access in many hotels will run you about ten bucks a day and in the Queen Mary, it didn’t matter because I got almost no wifi signal in my room. Browsing the web over 3G in my room was a huge convenience on many occasions.

Gazette

I read a lot of blogs. I try to stay on top of industry news and events and still read blogs of colleagues and influential bloggers. I could lock down an hour in my room to do this on the laptop, but then I wouldn’t be vacationing, would I? Instead, I prefer to skim my preferred feeds in the frequent spare moments when I’m waiting for Michelle to get ready, the elevator is taking forever, or, dare I say it… the bathroom. Catching up in these otherwise wasted spare minutes leaves that hour free for vacationing.

Camera

I have a digital camera and it takes better pictures than my iPhone, but it also runs on AA batteries, is inconvenient to tote around, and lacks the luxury of instant sharing. With the iPhone’s camera, I can snap off a shot any time and I can take thousands before I run out of space. There’s tons of ways to share my photos, from the Facebook or MySpace apps to Twitter apps to Flickr apps like the one mentioned below. Additionally, with the 3G S, I was able to shoot video, which I found myself doing a lot more on this trip.

FlickIt

One of the apps I use the most, vacationing or not, is FlickIt. It just uploads your photos right to your Flickr account. You can add detailed information and tags to each photo, but I usually just do that later from a PC. The only thing missing is the ability to upload videos to my Flickr account. Then it would be perfect.

WiFiTrak

WiFi is almost always a better option than 3G in terms of speed, but when you travel, you often have to wait until you’re at the hotel or near a hot spot and even then, it will usually cost enough to make you grimace a bit. One way around this is to leech off someone else’s WiFi. Just fire up this app and find a suitable (and open) connection and use it. As seen here, you won’t always find an open router, but when one is nearby it helps to have a fast way of knowing and connecting to it.

Bonus : RDP

What if that piece of information, email, phone number, etc is only available to you from your home or office computer? This happened to me over the weekend. I can’t think of a better test case. Servers were about to be moved and I needed quick access to some IP addresses that were in a list only on my computer at the office. I was on the beach with no other electronics than my phone, but I opened the RDP app and connected to my computer at the office, got the information I needed, and went back to enjoying the beach. The alternative would have been to catch a cab, get back to the hotel, fire up the laptop and pay for the WiFi access. I have only needed this app twice and it could use a little bit of tweaking, but both times it was a life saver.

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The symptoms
- Your iPhone displays “slide for emergency” message and only allows emergency phone calls.
- Your phone no longer drops down for options in iTunes
- You see the following error when you connect the phone:

The cause
It would appear that the iTunes store is just overloaded. I’m only speculating here, but I imagine the connection to the iTunes store is to validate and update any apps you’ve purchased and downloaded. If iTunes needs to re-download any apps for any reason, you can imagine the rush on the iTunes servers with everyone upgrading all at once. This looks like something Apple may have overlooked.

The solution
If this is, in fact, an issue of Apples iTunes store servers simply being overloaded, the solution will be to just wait. Unfortunately, those of us with now “bricked” iPhones are left without service while we wait for Apple to fix the problem or for the swarm of requests to Apple’s servers to die down. Either way, it feels like incredibly bad planning on Apple’s part. To get it to come back to life, just repeat the following process until it works:
- dismiss the error message
- eject (See the second update below first)
- unplug
- plug back in

The most frustrating part is that I can’t use the phone at all now. I’d be ok with not getting to some of my apps for a while, but this is just crippling.

UPDATE: After following the above process a few more times, it came back to life quickly. If your iPhone still doesn’t work, just keep trying the above and it should be back in no time.

UPDATE 2: While linking back to this post, Mashable pointed out that there’s another way to force iTunes to try again and again. Just click the iTunes Store and then click the phone again. My process worked for me, but Mashable points out that it comes with the risk of data loss. I partly assumed that everyone does a backup first. In any case, keep that in mind.

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Today, Apple announced the introduction of it’s all new iPod Shuffle. Redesigned, it is smaller than a AA battery and can actually speak your song titles to you with the new VoiceOver feature so you know what you’re listening to. For those who stayed away from previous Shuffle models due to the lack of display, this should come as great news. Here’s more from the Apple press release:

CUPERTINO, California—March 11, 2009—Apple® today introduced the all-new iPod® shuffle, the world’s smallest music player at nearly half of the size of the previous model, and the first music player that talks to you. The revolutionary new VoiceOver feature enables iPod shuffle to speak your song titles, artists and playlist names. The third generation iPod shuffle is significantly smaller than a AA battery, holds up to 1,000 songs and is easier to use with all of the controls conveniently located on the earphone cord. With the press of a button, you can play, pause, adjust volume, switch playlists and hear the name of the song and artist. iPod shuffle features a gorgeous new aluminum design with a built-in stainless steel clip that makes it ultra-wearable.

Read the rest here.

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(the rest of the photos are here, by the way)

It seems like so long ago that the iPhone hit the market with a bang and it’s still considered by many to be the best cell phone you can get. Over the last year or two, many speculated about various concept phones and if any of them would be an “iPhone killer”, including me. One of those hopefuls was Google’s promise of a Google phone, which people quickly dubbed the “Gphone”. A few months after Apple brought us the second generation iPhone, T-Mobile announced the release of their Android-running G1 and people started to get excited about owning one.

I’ve seen a lot of other phones come out that seem to follow the iPhone’s lead in many of their features, but none have swayed me from my opinion that the iPhone is far superior. The only one that comes close so far is the HTC T-Mobile G1, so when I had a chance to compare the two side by side, I jumped on it. I played with the G1 for hours, taking pictures along the way before creating a comparison video and finally putting together my conclusions.

First, the technical comparison

(image from Wired)
(Note that the G1 also plays video)

One of the things I think the G1 really could have used is a multi-touch screen, but I guess I’m just spoiled by my iPhone. There have been rumors, but nothing solid yet. A standard headphone jack would be nice, too. You can always listen with USB headphones, but that limits your options. One area the G1 technically surpassed the iPhone was the built in camera. Delivering 3.2 mega pixels, it offers a much better picture than the iPhone’s 2.0 mega pixel camera.

Getting hands on
Part 1:

Part 2:

The videos above cover most of what I’ve played with, but here’s some of what I found that’s worth noting:

- The iPhone offers a sliding software lock and optional password protection, while the G1 employs the old method of hitting any button and then hit “Menu” to unlock the phone, but it also offers another cool option where you store a gesture pattern like a happy face or a cursive G and you repeat that gesture to unlock the phone.

- Both phones allow for multiple pages to display icons for key features and applications. The G1 sets itself apart here, though, allowing its owner to also display search boxes and widgets like the big clock we keep seeing in G1 photos. Better still, these can all be moved anywhere. The iPhone makes you stack your icons neatly, gravitating to the top left of the screen, but G1 is a wild child, letting you throw those suckers wherever you want. Rebel. To accommodate all this freedom, G1 tucks most of its icons in a little slide-out panel, so you can hide the stuff you use rarely and keep your key items on the main screens.

- Both platforms offer Google Maps. My iPhone has Google Earth. I’m not sure if the G1 offers Google Earth, but it includes Street View and Compass Mode, which is very cool. Just watch the video to see what I mean.

- Oddly, the Google Search app on the G1 didn’t work nearly as well as on my iPhone.

- It doesn’t appear that I can create picture folders in the g1 like I can in the iPhone, but that may just require more testing.

- Setting up email was incredibly easy on the g1. The iPhone requres me to go to the phone’s settings area to add or remove an email account which is a little annoying.

- Both phones offer easy access to a wealth of third-party applications, both paid, and free. They’re both, hands down, vastly better than the alternatives I’d become used to with Windows Mobile phones.

- Adding music with the g1 is as easy as dropping MP3s from my computer into the phone’s shared storage, but the sound quality pales compared to the iPhone. The iPhone’s music play back is loud and clear, while the G1′s is a bit muffled and tinny.

- G1′s roller ball can easily switch away from the text box in focus on accident if bumped, but is very handy in Street View. The integrated keyboard is tiny, but useful. My main problem here is that I have to physically slide it out every time I need to type something, which can be hard one-handed, unlike the iPhone, where the software keyboard just appears as needed. The mix of a hardware keyboard and an optional software keyboard that could be accessed with a quick tap would be a great improvement.

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There were only a handful of entries, but I still saw some avid participation. It should be noted that there were a lot of comments on various photos, on Flickr, when only comments on the single laser photo counted as entries. So here’s the breakdown of entries:

Comments on either post (12):
Comments on the one Flickr photo (3):
Fav on Flickr photos (2):
Tweeted post (2):
Stumbled post (8):

As always, I headed over to random.org to pick a winner:

Our winner is MarixD. Get me your address privately and I’ll send your new laser out.

Don’t worry. If you didn’t win this contest, I’m sure I’ll have another very soon. If you can’t wait, check out some of the other cool contests around the web:

- ShoeMoney is giving away the all new Macbook AND a Macbook AIR, courtesy of MarketLeverage and QuickSprout, respectively. Hurry, though. There’s only a couple days left.

- Kid Tech Guru is celebrating 3 months of blogging with over $400 in prizes

- MiniSpace.com is also giving away a Macbook Air in their design contest, which I will be entering for sure.

There’s tons of contests out there and lots of free stuff to be had, so search the web for them, or just subscribe to my blog and I’ll mention more when I do another contest.

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Share them
There’s over 100 Million blogs, alone, and they’re all looking for pictures for their blogs. If you’re like me, a lot of your photos are just personal, but many are artistic in nature. These are the photos you want others to see. These are the ones looking for publication. Flickr is a great place to get your photo noticed, but if you want someone to publish it in their blog, you’ll want to set your licensing. I use “Attribution Creative Commons” for all of my non-persona because I just want the eyes on my photos at this point. You can just share some if you like, reserving the rights on those images that you want to sell rights to or personal items. This licensing type allows for anyone to use your photos as long as they credit you back in the way you desire. My photos require a link back to the photo’s page. If another blogger happens across one of my shared photos, they will find that they are free to use it with a link back to the photo on Flickr. If the photo is used in print, my name should be mentioned along with the URL to my site. This kind of sharing can lead to a lot of inbound traffic for the rest of your photos.

Send your photos to groups
Flickr has tons and tons of photo groups. A group is just a bunch of people all sharing photos that fit into a specific theme. Michelle and I spent some time in London and Paris for our honeymoon. During our time there, I took nearly 500 photos and about 80% or more of these are non-personal and intended to be artsy. These photos are a perfect candidate for the groups “London” and “Paris”, respectively, of course. All I did was join the two groups. Then I opened my “Honeymoon” set and opened the photos I wanted to add to the London group. In each photo page, I clicked “Send To Group”, selected the group, confirmed, and then closed the photo page. When you have a couple hundred photos to add at once, this can become tedious. Luckily, there’s an easier way to add multiple photos to a single group. Head to the group’s page, and click “Add Photos or Video”. What you get is a page that lets you select a bunch of photos at a time to add. Just navigate to the set to select photos from and start clicking. Most groups impose a daily limit, so choose wisely. When you’re done there, find more groups. Many of my photos were of castles in London, so I found a large group for photos of Castles and added those photos to that group as well. Look at some of your best photos and think about characteristics that might place that photo in certain groups. Find those groups, join them, and add your photos that apply. If done right, you will have thousands of new views on your photos.

Give people what they want
Sure you have your ideal photos that you want to promote, but what if they don’t fit easily into a group, you don’t want to share certain photos for free? The goal here is to get more people looking at your work, for starters. For some of you, your ideal future includes getting paid licensing fees on some of your photos. Either way, you need to give people what they’re looking for on Flickr. There’s a couple easy ways to do this.

First (and easiest), is to just make a list of what’s making news right now. Primarily (in the U.S., anyway) that’s the ongoing presidential election. That means there’s thousands of bloggers out there writing post after post about it. Think about what they’re writing, and shoot photos or create artwork that would fit with their posts. Today, for example, there’s probably 500 articles that remind readers to register to vote. If you thought about that last week and took a good picture of a “Register to vote here” sign, some blogger out there would probably be in your photo stream right now, glad to see that the usage rights fit his situation. You can also shoot photos of stuff that’s always popular, like sports cars, girls in bikinis, cuter-than-cute fuzzy animals, etc.

Another winner is backgrounds. Backgrounds and wallpapers have been popular on the web since long before Flickr and there are sites that would love to have free rights to use them. Create some backgrounds with attribution rights and you’ll soon have sites displaying your work and linking back to your Flickr pages. Last month, I turned my yellow Lamborghini photo into an iPhone background and this site posted it for people to download. This weekend, I created some fairly simple, but nice-looking iPhone wallpapers with just a background and some PhotoShop effects on the Apple Logo. Another site is already displaying and linking to them. I haven’t even jumped into full backgrounds, either. If you’re shooting photos, try for the Eden effect (an image of somewhere I can look at all day while stuck in a cubicle), things people are fanatical about (cats, dogs, sports, cars), or artsy, but not overbearing, patterns.

Either way you decide to go, you’ll have people looking for your photos and passing them on to other people, displaying them on their computers and iPhones, etc. For me, iPhone backgrounds were an obvious choice. They are small, pretty easy to make from most photos, there’s a lot of buzz still for the iPhone, and there’s potentially about ten million people who might want to download them. If you have photos that you want people to pay a small license fee to use, those people are more likely to see your photos when you’re promoting the free stuff.

Tag and Title!
I, myself, sometimes forget, but you should always tag your images and title them properly. An image with a rich title (use keywords) and good tags will have a much better chance of being seen in search results both on and off Flickr. Once you’re in the search results, the thumbnail should earn the click on it’s own, but you have to get the image in front of someone first. Is your image a 1024 by 768 background image of the AZ Cardinals’ new stadium? If so, your tags should include “background” and “Cardinals”, but dig a little deeper, too. Add in “1024×768″, “wallpaper”, “Arizona”, “stadium”, and anything else that someone might search for that would accurately describe your photo.

Use your own images and link back
I really can’t think of a long drawn out way to say this. It’s simple… If you use MySpace, LiveJournal, write a blog, etc., use your images and use the code Flickr gives you under the image. It creates a link right back to the image. This is a gateway to the rest of your images, where someone else might find an image for their blog or a friend on LiveJournal might grab the linking code to share the image, too.

Know your numbers
Suppose you didn’t do anything above (not on purpose, anyway), and just happened to upload a photo that hit the mark. People are commenting on it and adding it as a favorite. If you know where those people are coming from, which photos they like the bes, and why, you have a recipe to recreate success.

Looking back at my own stats, I can see that the most popular thing I’ve uploaded to date was my “Blue Screen of Death” background for the iPhone. It was also the least effort to create, but happened to catch on because you have to view it to read it and it’s funny having the famous Windows mood-killer displayed on a Mac product. In any case, I can also see that it has become the “favorite” of three people, which is more important to me. The fact that someone went the extra step of making it a favorite tells me that they liked it a lot. The fact that three people did so tells me that I should spit out a few more geek humor iPhone backgrounds before I publish this post. Get to know your statistics pages. There’s more than you might think by passively glancing at a page or two. Click every link and take note of which images get the most love.

Don’t be afraid to learn
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it a thousand times. You’re never SO good that you can’t learn from someone else. Look at what other people are doing and get inspired. Find tutorials like this awesome guide on how to get “perfect exposure” out of your images. Soak it all in, try it, ask people for their opinions. After all your marketing, the image really should speak for itself.

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I don’t have an iPhone. I have wanted one since they came out, and I wanted it even more after playing with one. At first, I thought that someone would have to come out with something close enough to appease me. LG got close, but didn’t hit the mark.

Two things kept me from buying the iPhone. The first was the cost. Even though I have a $500+ phone now, Apple is famous for 1-upping themselves pretty often, making first generation products drop in value pretty quickly. Just watch ebay over the next few weeks. The second reason I’ve stayed away is because they penned an exclusive deal with AT&T. Sure, I could get one that would work on my long-time provider, Verizon, but then I’d be loathe to receive support for the thing, and Verizon had me locked into a contract (I’m free next month, coincidentally).

So now I am faced with a decision. Do I pick up a super cheap hacked iPhone for Verizon, do I pick up a brand new 3G when it comes out and go with AT&T (who has the exclusive for four more years), or do I stick with what I have and wait for something comparable to the iPhone?

Pros and cons of moving to AT&T and the iPhone 3G
When you buy a cell phone and cell phone service, the goal is to get a phone with good service, not to get a toy. I have to keep reminding myself that. That said, the new phone should be faster and have much faster web services. Plus, the 3G network is supposed to drop less calls (I keep hearing about iPhones and dropped calls). It looks like it’s the best choice when it comes to having a new phone, but I have a feeling I could regret moving from Verizon to AT&T. A downside is that I lose the benefit of mobile-to-mobile for all my Verizon friends, but when I add in a data plan, it seems cheaper than Verizon. This is also the newer phone, so it’s not “unsellable” as soon as I get it like an older model.

Pros and cons of getting a hacked older iPhone on Verizon
First of all, the cons. It wouldn’t be supported at all. I also would not be able to get newer software developed for the new models (unless I can and just don’t know it). Finally, the older models will be nearly impossible to sell for a while with the 3G hitting the market next month. But that also works in my favor. I figure I can get more on ebay for my old phone than I’ll have to pay for a hacked first generation iPhone with extras early next month. This is also a nice medium between not getting an iPhone and having to bend over backwards for one. There is also some other hidden benefits to getting a hacked iPhone, like the tons and tons of homebrew out there, not having to worry about voiding a warranty (since it’s already voided), etc.

Pros and cons of sticking with what I have
There’s not much good or bad about leaving things well enough alone. I don’t have an iPhone, but I have a pretty decent phone that is well supported and is made to work on Verizon. But I still don’t have an iPhone. My current phone has two drawbacks that I think an iPhone would handle nicely. The battery life is horrible. I am constantly running out of battery life. The iPhone has a much smarter method for locking/unlocking. I have to tap in a specific spot on my phone and then hit an unlock button, compared to the slide touch lock iPhone uses.

At the end of the day, I know a few things for sure:
- I really want an iPhone
- The timing of next month’s 3G iPhone opens the door for me to get one
- Michelle made me promise she gets one if I do.

So what about you? Do you have an iPhone? Do you plan on grabbing a 3G?

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