Jared's Blog

Service vs. Software

The iPhone is undoubtedly the best phone on the market. Its interface, features, and 90,000+ applications put it in a category all by itself. It’s superior too all other mobile devices in almost every way possible. Sadly, I’ll never own one as long as Apple remains with AT&T as its only service provider.

Working at Tumblr, I’m the only person in the office without an iPhone. I own a BlackBerry Curve 8300 and it’s a perfectly fine phone, but its features are incomparable to those of the iPhone. The only thing keeping me on it is Verizon. Unlike everyone else here, I get reception at work. I also get reception everywhere in NYC. Hell, I get reception virtually everywhere I go. They don’t, and they probably never will as long as they remain on AT&T (at least in the NYC region).

There seems to exist two main categories of people when it comes to choosing mobile devices: those that favor the software (hardware, too) over the service and those that favor the service over the software. I fall into the latter category, but it amazes me how many people fall into the first. A mobile phone is, at its core, just that - a phone. What’s the point of paying for something if it doesn’t work on a consistent basis? I’m sure an iPhone geek like Marco (I say that lovingly) could provide a reasonable counterargument, but I’d be hard-pressed to believe that a phone with cool applications and shit service is better than one with great service and average software.