It's about 3 months after the iPhone launch, and happy with the improvements, I was planning on changing our "wait" verdict" to a full on and rabid "Buy." That wasn't because of Apple, but because of the cool apps being put out there by independent developers. That came to an end yesterday after the new Apple firmware 1.1.1 neutered the handset. Sure, unlocked iPhones are broken. But more importantly, Apple wiped away the powerful programs that helped push the iPhone to greatness. With this, I'm going to have to move our recommendation from "Wait" to "Don't hold your breath." I'm done with this handset until third party apps come back.

It's understandable for Apple to wage a war on unlocking the iPhone, since they share revenue from fees with AT&T. But the truth is, if the phone service was awesome, like it is on iTunes, there wouldn't be a need to unlock the iPhone. Secondly, bricking these things is totally uncool, and apparently, malicious because according to some early code investigations by the iPhone Dev Team, they could have avoided this entirely.

I get that Apple might not have wanted to wage a long back-and-forth war with hackers, as the PSP developers are. And this kind of big blow is going to be a devastating and effective scare tactic, even if a fix comes a few days later. Unlike a PSP, people can't go a few days without their phones, without social or work hiccups. This is why I never unlocked my main iPhone, only testing these hacks on a spare 4GB test dummy. But I don't want to be held hostage like this. Did I buy this phone or am I just renting it?

Screw the unlock for a second. Let's talk about the those third party apps. Programs like the faux-GPS, IM clients, Flickr Upload, and NES emulator, what did they ever do but make the iPhone far better than the stock original, far more competitive with open platform super phones like the Nokia N95, which I will now be switching to.



I look at my iPhone, with version 1.1.1 software on it, compared to the old hacked-on. I'm happy for the iTunes store, which we've been waiting for. But it's not more important than fixing things and adding things like copy/paste, email search. And it's certainly not better than all those programs that I can't use anymore. Here's the comparo chart, from Rob Beschizza at Wired based on a chart from 9to5:



At Mossberg's All Things D conference, Jobs mentioned that the thing Apple wasn't good at compared with MSFT, was the ability to work with partners. Some believe that's a big part of why they lost the Big OS War back when GI Joe was a Saturday-morning cartoon. So why make the same mistake twice?

Come on, Apple, make things right. Even if you have to fight the unlocks, the apps deserve to live.