Monday, April 12, 2010

Why iPad and iPhone cannot tether

When the iPad WIFI edition was launched on April 3, 2010, the first thing I kept listening out for was whether it had tethering. I had previously blogged on this column that I really want tethering on the iPad. When I realized that it didn't support this feature, it began to look like the terse 'No' email reply on this subject credited to Apple CEO Steve jobs may have an element of truth in it. One wonders why the iPad would not support a service that will allow you to use your own existing cellular data plan on through gadget in your pocket but will encourage you to buy yet another data plan.

When I first got my first generation iPhone, it did not have a data plan. iPhone had just been released in the US. It would not arrive Canada for another year+ and I had purchased it on eBay. Those pre-iphone days, data plan cost more than molten gold with cellular companies. So, I mostly used my iPhone without data plan. Once in a while, I would brouse and get billed by kiloBytes and believe me, it wasn't funny. Because of this, most of what made the iPhone fun was not accessible on my phone outside my home network. In my home network, I would browse on fuller screens, anyway.

It wasn't till we got the 3GS that I slapped on a full data plan on my iPhone and the device truly came to life. The power of the iPhone is not so much as in phone calling but in its "information anywhere" concept. And you can't do that if you were not always connected. This fact is much more so for the iPad because much as you can use a data-cripped iPhone as a phone, you can't use a data-cripped iPad as much anything else without limitation. Even Amazon Kindle gets that.

Several iPhone users I know have data plans that are less that 20% utilized. The major cellular data providers in Canada provide tethering for free so you can use your iPhone data on other computers. That is why it would only have made sense if Apple allowed the iPad to consume this same available iPhone service. But then, we hear that Steve Jobs said 'No'. It looks like the bigger Apple gets, their chief spokesperson sound more and more like Bill Gates. Or even worse! Bill Gates never called Adobe and Google lazy in the same month!

Within 1 week of iPad release, it got Jailbroken and following quickly the next week is a $9.99 app called MyWi, as reported here, which provides iPhone/iPad tethering support. When I read that, it felt sad that a company like Apple, whose percieved social model over the years has been to brand Microsoft as the evil empire, is turning into a worse-than-Microsoft just after a few years of mobile device dominance. If they owned Windows, they probably would control who you married by now -- "All marriages must go through the iWed app. Every Minister must register with us and we share the proceeds 60/40. We decide which marriage to allow. We can also annul a marriage after the fact". If this sounds similar to what happens at the Apple AppStore, that's probably because it is.

I was in a conversation Saturday night with a guy that lived in Russia. This guy told me that capitalism in Russian language is transliterated as "Man's exploitation of Man". It felt too extreme then. But I believe that every iPad user who has to buy a separate data plan while at the same time has 80% of his/her iPhone data plan lying waste every month is being deliberately exploited.

This smells the same as a "pre-existing condition" in the US healthcare system. Man's exploitation of man!

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