O2’s been criticised for treating iPhone users with contracts like everyone else and forcing them to honour said contracts or buy them out. With O2 having set a precedent on the move from the original iPhone to 3G, I have some sympathy with user expectations not being met, but understand O2’s reasoning. However, my experience over the last week in the Pay & Go space (and, frankly, O2’s now very regular network outages) has removed any lingering doubt that the company needs a slap.

My story begins last year, and ends with some ‘O2 stupid’. Last year, I bought a 3G iPhone on Pay & Go, because I make few calls via mobile and figured it’d be cheaper in the long run. Prior to the Pay & Go pricing becoming official, I noted how it went up by £60, but O2 added an extra six months of internet bolt-on. Essentially, O2 got more money up front and presumably hoped you’d not use the bolt-on that much, thereby generating more profits per Pay & Go device. As a consumer, this made no odds to me, since I’d be buying the bolt-on anyway. However, I had, as far as I was concerned, paid up front for 12 months of usage.

Clearly, though, I’m a total idiot. I assumed I’d be able to retain remaining bolt-on time in some manner when transferring the phone. I’m in the market for a Pay & Go 3GS and plan to give the 3G to my wife. Surely, I thought, I’d get to keep my remaining time or transfer it?

My first email to O2 revealed that bolt-ons are tied directly to SIM cards. I was told that I could buy a 3GS and my wife would have my remaining internet time on the 3G. Something in the curt nature of the email started alarm bells ringing, and so I asked for further clarification regarding transferring numbers, and a rather large snag became apparent:

“If you buy a new iPhone and transfer your existing number on the new SIM card your current SIM card will be permanently disconnected,” said O2. “If this happens we won’t be able to transfer the free Bolt On to your new SIM card. Also you wife won’t be able to transfer her number to this SIM card.”

O2’s wonderful suggestion to me is this:

“I would suggest that you wait until the free Bolt On gets ended and then buy the new iPhone.”

It seems O2 is treating the bolt-on as a freebie that the company gives you when you buy an iPhone because O2 is made of fluffy bunnies, and not because it’s bundled into the device’s price, and not because you’ve actually paid real cash money for it. My assumption is also that I’ll have to—for no good reason—buy a new SIM for the 3G so that my wife can use it, or just jailbreak the phone (which I don’t want to do).

I’ve got three months left on my bolt-on. I’m now hoping the rumours are true and the announcement of the end of O2’s iPhone monopoly comes around that point, because its Pay & Go attitude strikes me as unbelievably dumb and has really rubbed me up the wrong way.

UPDATE: Phil Schiller Responds on Daring Fireball regarding dictionary app Ninjawords and the App Store.

The iPhone and iPod touch are nothing special from a hardware standpoint. In fact, they are in some ways (such as the iPhone camera) inferior to the competition. However, a combination of a fantastic UI and the App Store ensured both devices became top sellers. But the environment is changing fast, and Apple’s doing little to help.

In terms of UI, others are playing catch-up, and this is—bar flinging lawsuits around—something Apple can’t really guard against. It’s long been an R&D department for less able companies, and that will continue. But Apple’s handling of the App Store has gone from the worrisome to the surprising to the outright absurd.

Initially, one could argue that the App Store was new and surprisingly successful, and so the submissions reviewers were caught off guard and made the odd mistake. This was usually rectified via a combination of public pressure and explanation from developers. Now, though, it seems Apple’s being at once systematically destructive, puritanical and utterly stupid.

I reported yesterday on TechRadar about Apple censoring a dictionary, a story initially broke by Daring Fireball. Today, TUAW claims Apple’s about to start removing eBook apps, under the guise of copyright concerns (something Apple doesn’t seem terribly concerned about when it comes to gaming, judging by the number of IP breaches littering the store).

I sincerely hope there’s little truth to this story, but the report claims Apple’s now even rejecting eBook apps from developers who can prove they own rights to the content. If that’s the case, we’ll presumably soon see the likes of Classics, Eucalyptus and Stanza removed from the store, smashing the App Store’s credibility to dust and removing the ability for Apple handhelds to act as eReaders.

In the aforementioned Daring Fireball piece, John Gruber said: “Every time I think I’ve seen the most outrageous App Store rejection, I’m soon proven wrong. I can’t imagine what it will take to top this one.” I think the removal of eBooks and readers would just about do it.

You know what? You can keep your Spotlight, your Cut, Copy & Paste, your MMS and your landscape keyboards, your improved calendar and your Voice Memos* app. With Apple’s latest iPhone OS update, it was a much smaller new feature that made me happy.

Buried in Settings > Phone is a shiny new field: ‘My Number’. For many iPhone owners, this won’t make any odds, but I bought a Pay and Go model, and transferred a number from my old T-Mobile account. Although the transfer was eventually fine, my iPhone resolutely decided that my number (accessible via the Phone app) was the one on the iPhone SIM card, not the one that had been transferred.

As someone notoriously bad at remembering my phone number, this wasn’t great. However, the aforementioned new feature means my Swiss-Cheese memory won’t have the problem again. (And, yeah, I know many other phones have been able to do this for ages—yada yada—but my phone couldn’t.)

* In fact, you really can keep that one, Apple, because I don’t use it, and it’s getting really annoying that you can’t get rid of the default apps. Do we really need Stocks ‘forced’ on us? Gnh.

TechRadar just put an opinion piece online sure to grate with the Apple faithful. Rob Mead asserts that Snow Leopard is “little more than a service pack” and that “Windows 7 has raised the bar—and OS X 10.6 can’t reach it”.

The article goes on to lambaste Apple for having the audacity to release a system upgrade that doesn’t have any huge new features, and suggests that because of this it will “inevitably be crushed under the wheels of the mighty Windows 7 juggernaut”. I find that viewpoint perverse in the extreme.

First and foremost, criticising Apple for Snow Leopard being all about architecture rather than new features is rather like having a go at the driver in front of you for turning left after they’ve had their left-hand indicator flashing for the last quarter mile. Apple has been upfront about Snow Leopard from the start, saying that it’s about next-generation technologies and not new features.

Mead claims that this will make it a tough sale, and there at least I agree. But the fact that Snow Leopard looks much the same as Leopard isn’t something we should complain about. While I’d love to see a unified UI, I’m glad Apple—with the exception of QuickTime X—has avoided yet more pointless ‘make it look different in screen grabs to make people think it’s new’ gimmicky UI changes (see: the hideous Leopard ‘glass’ Dock and the semi-transparent menu bar, the latter of which subsequently caused much back-peddling).

Also, I’d sooner see Apple plugging the gaps for once, rather than losing focus by concentrating on the next big thing. It’s done the same with OS X iPhone 3.0, largely making important tweaks rather than wowing the audience. Likewise, Mac OS X 10.6 improves Stacks, Finder and Mail. AI for ‘intelligent’ PDF text selection in Preview might not be a show-stopping feature like Time Machine, but it’ll certainly provide the “real world benefits these changes will bring” that Mead thinks is missing from this release. The same is true for the 6GB you’ll claw back on your hard drive, the video-editing and sharing now built directly into QuickTime X, out-of-process Safari plug-ins, and the Exposé/Dock mash-up that obliterates one of the consumer-oriented Windows 7 features that had stolen the limelight—its revised taskbar.

Mead also complains about PowerPC support being ditched, and here I just say: tough. Technology moves on, and we’re three years past the Intel switch. It’s not like you have to bin a PPC Mac if the latest operating system won’t run on it (in fact, my sole PPC Mac quite happily waddles along on Tiger and is still regularly used), and to attack Apple by claiming people who splashed out on powerful Macs three or more years ago will lose out is risable.

Apple is a company that has always moved forward far more quickly than the likes of Microsoft, and it doesn’t look back. Apple shouldn’t compromise its important ‘overhaul’ upgrade, which sets the foundations for its future, just to cater for products that were end-of-lifed three years ago.

I run an iPhone reviews website called iPhoneTiny, driven by a Twitter feed, and I also write for various iPhone and Mac publications. This means I see a lot of iPhone apps and games, and regularly cull dozens of the things from my iPhone, to set up the next ‘batch’ of reviews.

The upside is that I’m convinced iPhone is a fantastic platform for all manner of things that people would never have believed just a short while ago. Apps like Bento and Things are great from a productivity standpoint, and myriad excellent games have significantly changed my viewpoint since writing Why iPod touch will never be a major gaming platform for Cult of Mac.

The downside—aside from a continual stream of press releases that direct me to an app’s store page rather than promo codes—is that iPhone has created a consumer group that has absolutely no understanding regarding value for money.

One of the first apps I bought for iPhone was Dropship. The game is essentially an update of Thrust, a 1986 arcade game from Firebird that itself riffed off the wonderful Gravitar coin-op. Dropship improves on the classic 8-bit release with dual-thumb controls, beautiful graphics and downloadable levels. More surprising was the price—I bought the app for £1.19. To put that in perspective, that’s 80p less than Thrust cost on cassette tape for the C64, way back in 1986.

Unlike other people, my problem isn’t so much that App Store titles are so cheap, but the fact buyers don’t seem to understand the sheer value of the items on offer. Recently rummaging around the US store, I found reviews for Power Toppler, a remake of C64 cult classic Nebulus. Like the original, the game is absurdly difficult, but it’s fairly good and worth persevering with, and at £1.19 (or $1.99 on the US store), I’d say that’s pretty good value—especially when you consider that’s roughly a third of the cost of the original Nebulus on Wii Virtual Console. Sadly, a recent review on the App Store stated that the game wasn’t worth two bucks.

iPhone owners need to take a step back and understand what they’re getting. Sure, some games are cheap and simple, but even they can be fantastic value. Witness Flight Control, which cost me just 59p, and yet provided more game time than about half the DS games I’ve bought over the past few years—and for considerably more than 59p. However, when you look at the likes of Frenzic (effectively iPhone’s Tetris, but just £1.79) and Eliss (a beautiful and unique touchscreen puzzler that sells for £1.79, but that would fetch £15+ if a DS version was possible), it’s clear too many iPhone owners are looking a gift horse in the mouth and then gobbing in it.