Be BOLD, shun the iPhone to save your wallets.

What with all the hype over the new iPhone 3GS which was announced at Apple’s latest WWDC, and the $99 iPhone 3G, you are probably all waiting with baited breath to get your hands on the latest sensation to hit the smartphone market.

And at $199/$99, who can blame you right ? That’s certainly better pricing than you’ll find for a lot of smartphones out there.

Well no …not exactly…

See the thing is, as fantastic as the iPhone may be, in the long run I Guarantee you it will make your wallet squirm. Here’s how:

- Apple may carry on touting its price cuts, but $99 is actually still $99 more than anyone else is asking. I don’t know how it is for you guys in the US, but over here the carriers predominantly cover the entire cost of their smartphones as a part of the contract. My ‘Blackberry Bold’ for instance, didn’t cost me a single cent.The reason you still pay money for your iphone then, is that the true cost of the device is much more than is let on. This would perhaps be easier to excuse if the iPhone was on a different playing field to all its competitors, but it isn’t. Devices such as the Bold, Storm or HTC Magic all offer comparable experiences, so there really isn’t any excuse for the charge.

- The iPhone is still locked into AT&T (or O2 if you live over here in the UK), and the contracts are expensive! If the iPhone was an open device, then carriers would be introducing new price plans, (and extras etc.) all the time to try and persuade you to ‘buy theirs’. This drives down the prices of tariffs, increases innovations in the features of a contract and can only be good news for the consumer, which is the point …right ? Well apparently not. This is especially important, as phones like the Bold are available on multiple carriers (so far as I know, the HTC Magic is only being shipped by vodafone over here in the UK, but hopefully that will change in the not too distant future).

- Lastly, I come to part which most would lift on high as the ultimate reason for the iPhones success, and justification for all past wrongs etc… The App store. I on the other hand, would argue that this is the side to the iPhone that will cost you the most money of all. All recent iPhone adverts I have seen have been focusing on the capabilities of various apps to make your life easier, and yes, I love them too. There are some truly great apps, and I would have to say that the active developer community behind them is one of the biggest plus points to the iPhones credit (and who can argue with 1,000,000,000 downloads?). Its not so much the apps that bother me then, as the way Apple sell’s them to you. Psychologically, it is far to easy to spend money you don’t have and just one more cool application.

Now at this point, you are probably crying foul, and pointing out that Blackberry has an app store all of its own, so what makes the iPhone so bad ? The thing is though, blackberry apps are charged through your paypal account, and every time you log onto paypal (about once a day for me) you can see a precise breakdown of how much you spent and where you spent it. The apple app store is much more faceless than this, not giving you the option to say … see how much you have already spent that week ? (If such a feature does exist, then I apologise, but if I couldn’t find it, then it amounts to the same thing anyway)

Instead it just siphons of money from your credit card, and before you know it, you’re buying a couple of apps a week (not unbelievable by any stretch) and you’ve added at least another £12 onto an already £30-35 per month contract.

It could be said that its your responsibility to keep your spending in check, and why should Apple make it easier for you to dissuade yourself from ‘just one more purchase’ ? But when the Apple platform is built up in the media to be so dependent upon/enhanced by these apps, I think the responsibility (at least in part) does lie with Apple.

There you have it, Apple iPhones are great, but perhaps no greater than the competition and are rather more expensive on top.

Don’t get me wrong, in some ways I love what Apple are doing with the iPhone. But at the moment, we, as consumers, are enjoying something of a smartphone gold rush, with companies trying to up the ante left, right and centre – if we don’t question some of Apple’s downsides, and allow them to occupy an almost Google like position at the top of the smartphone market, the other companies will fade into relative obscurity, carving inroads in their own small niches. The competition, and pressure for market-wide innovation, will drop off, and developments could slow to a crawl.

I’d love to hear whether you think the iPhone is justified in its status, and long-term price tag ? .