Ready for a phone buying trip to 1992?

Many years ago, the only way to buy a cell phone was to go into your local carrier store, pick a phone, get it activated, and leave. If you want to take a trip back in time, it looks like Apple might be ready to fulfill your wishes.

Curiously absent from the phone info, is any mention of purchasing the phone online. Further, reports are starting to surface indicating you have to activate the phone in the store, and there might be a penalty if you don't activate within 30 days.

The original iPhone broke new ground, and Apple showed the industry an all-new, and for the consumer, far more convenient way to activate phones. What seemed to be a bold move towards a new customer-empowered world, has fallen back to the old bricks and mortar purchase and activation model.

At the original launch this may have made more sense. After all, the phones could be sent anywhere in the world to be unlocked and used. Now that 22 countries will have the iPhone with several more before the end of the year, the black/grey market for the phone is shrinking. It's a terrible time to decide to fall back to the old way of doing business. Although come to think of it, we didn't have copy and paste, or MMS on phone in 1992 either. Thanks for the trip, Apple.

The iPhone: Turning a missing feature into a hype machine

There's a lot of buzz about the next version of the iPhone, and frankly, it's been that way since shortly after the phone launched. The word, or more precisely number and letter, on everyone's mind is 3G. Yes, 3G. You would think it was the savior of cell phone users everywhere. Curiously, a year ago, most of the country probably hadn't heard of 3G. Yet a year later, it's the must-have feature for the next version of the iPhone. Which got me thinking: what if the iPhone had 3G to begin with? What would we all be talking about now?

Apple has a knack for (whether by design or not) leaving off a feature, or neglecting to add a feature, and then the lack of that feature actually fuels sales and even more talk about the product. Think back to a time when the iPod didn't do video. The buzz reached fever pitch after the iPod Photo. Everyone was suddenly concerned with when would the iPod play video. So here we are again. If the iPhone had 3G from the start, would rumor sites be buzzing about text copy & paste? (another missing feature) or perhaps an iChat client? It's doubtful these kinds of rumors would fuel the tech blogs the way the lack and perceived need of 3G on the phone has.

3G will not make the phone thinner, lighter, give it longer battery life, or make the UI more intuitive. It won't let you copy and paste text, record voice memos, or easily create ringtones. What it does do is provide fuel for the blogger fire for an entire year.

So what do you think? If the iPhone has 3G networking from the beginning, what would everyone be getting ready for now? Do you think Apple deliberately leaves off features to build hype, or are the media/bloggers to blame/credit?