Is the iPhone a walled garden?

UPDATE: Immediately after I wrote this, I noticed that Boing Boing has a riff on it as well. But he didn’t use any swear words, so mine’s more fun.

Quietly tucked in amongst the breathless, fawning and almost completely uncritical reviews of the iPhone, I found a blog entry from PC World (Oh, the irony!) containing the little nugget I was most interested in: according to a Mac spokesperson, “Apple does not plan to offer an iPhone VoIP client (for Skype or any other service).”

Worse, Cingular will retain exclusive rights to service on the phone for an undisclosed period, making the phone a useless, though beautiful device, for 192 of the 193 countries in the world — not to mention the people who either can’t or won’t shell out the dough to buy the phone, buy out their existing contract with another carrier, and pay the estimated $90 monthly bill with Cingular.

Time will tell how this all rolls out, but it’s entirely possible that, in positioning the iPod as a traditional cellphone on steroids, as opposed to a true “Internet device”, Jobs has made his biggest deal with the devil since the iTunes DRM fiasco.

This wouldn’t disturb me per se — he’s got a business to run, and he’s certainly entitled to do what he does: make cool stuff and then spin like hell (when he referred to Safari as “the best browser in the world” I laughed aloud).

The problem is that as a business strategy, attracting consumers by limiting their choices doesn’t really work as well as it used to. In other words, I think Steve Jobs is still an awesome gadget maker, but he’s starting to get out of touch with how the kids want to be doing things these days. What they didn’t want to hear, I don’t think, is that fundamental portions of the iPhone experience will be very tightly controlled.

Basically, as the hype settles in, it seems to me that what we have is a new iPod with a phone thrown in, as opposed to a phone with an MP3 player thrown in. But Jobs pretty much had to do that, because all the phone companies are including MP3 players these days. The price tag has changed, but the game hasn’t — not yet, anyway.

This still may be the one cell phone to rule them all, as all the media outlets have been ejaculating in lockstep for a week now. But holy shit, people, it’s still only a cell phone.