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I am not an iPhone basher, nor am I an Apple basher. I've used Apple products since the early 1980s, when my dad got my sister and myself an Apple II Plus. To this day, my computers and MP3 players and operating systems are Apple.

But not my phone.

No, I am not in love with Windows Mobile, or the Palm OS, or Blackberry, or Symbian, or whatever strange operating system runs on my Samsung phone. I'm far from enamoured with Verizon or Sprint, although I did like TMobile a lot when I used them--but if today's iPhone was on TMobile, I still wouldn't have one.

Do I hate the iPhone? Far from it. I've used mobile phones for years and every one I've used has had an interface that was either years behind what the iPhone provides--or decades behind it. I think that visual voicemail is a great development and unlike every other phone (or PDA) I've had, the syncing just works. Mobile Safari is to the second best mobile browser out there, Opera Mini, as the Nikon D3 is to a camera using the Kodak Disc.

But when it came right down to it, I got an iPod touch rather than an iPhone.

Why?

Two terms: 3G and tethering.

I might have added to that list at various points in the iPhone's short history the lack of (Apple authorized) third party applications, but I hope that will be eliminated as a concern in the next week or so. I have a few third party applications installed on my Samsung. They are of varying quality; Google Maps is its usual remarkable self; GMail is useful even with the limited input possibilities of the keypad and five button pointer common on phones; Opera Mini is far better than the inbuilt browser; Twitlet (a Twitter client) is usable if bare bones and with the occasional issues related to the limited resolution of the display; and the IRC client is more like a dancing bear than anything else. Still, I am quite hopeful--particularly as one who dabbles in code--that useful iPhone applications will indeed exist from third parties.

I realize that 3G is not without its faults, including battery life decimation, but the speed that I get through my Sprint phone--and for perspective, I think Sprint is a horrible company to deal with and my Samsung A920 is one of the most bizarre examples of user interface in the history of many--is fast, fast, fast. Not as fast as my cable modem, but considerably faster than the low end DSL I encounter at my part time job's office. But for the handheld itself, I would really not have issues with EDGE, because if all that was available was EDGE, I think all I would be doing is checking email, which doesn't require a ton of bandwidth.

The bigger issue for me is tethering. Tethering, as used in this context, is to hook the phone up to a computer (typically the iBook I'm typing on right now) to use for data. I use this very often--several times a week. I'm not talking about just checking email; I'm talking about Web browsing, torrenting, accessing my VNC

server at home, downloading podcasts--just about the same way I use my cable modem at home. Given that my iBook's wireless card died this past week, I'm actually using tethering even in places with WiFi access and not regretting it. Sometimes I even use tethering in my truck if I need to desperately get a map or don't want to interrupt a huge torrent download. Right now I'm not just tethering my iBook, I'm using OS X's Internet Sharing and a mobile router to share the EVDO connection with several other users, and even with my iBook crippled due to a RAM failure (just 256 megabytes under its hood right now), it just ran a speed test at 664 Kb per second--through a cellular phone attached with a USB cable.

Aside from a hack that requires a jailbroken iPhone that allows another computer access to some Internet services through a SOCKS proxy via the iPhone's EDGE connection, there appears to be no current way to use the iPhone as a modem. Even if there is, the AT&T EDGE network is much slower than the EVDO network of Sprint. Sharing a connection with several other folks that originates with my Samsung EVDO phone is okay; sharing a connection using EDGE would be much more painful. The EVDO speed--remember, provided by a company I greatly dislike--is so fast that I'm considering getting a Cradlepoint router so I can share it without needing to tie up a USB port or two on my iBook. And interestingly, the device I'm most often sharing my EVDO connection with via WiFi is my iPod touch--almost making it what a 3G iPhone could be.

So, yes, I love the iPhone interface, as well as Apple itself, but unless and until a 3G iPhone with the ability to tether is unveiled, I'll be sticking to my iPod touch and my hated Samsung using hated Sprint--who has the fast data that I desire. So, Apple, I love you, I love the iPod touch, and I'd love to have an iPhone--with a couple of additions. Until then, sorry, there's no iPhone for me.