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“You know you want one! You just admitted it!” Kelly hit me with her you know I’m right stare.

“Well, I don’t necessarily want one – it’s a little on the extravagant side right now. I just figured I’d see what it’s all about.” My pitiful attempts at feigning disinterest were failing miserably.

The truth is, when I stood in the showroom at our local AT&T store, playing with their demo iPhones as the sales rep showed me one completely-sweet app after another, I did want one. Looking at all the cool stuff the shiny little slab of telephonic sexiness could do, I would have been happy to take one home. Hell – the whole reason I was there was to look into getting an iPhone for Kelly as a Valentine’s day gift. But I stayed strong. My willpower (and intentionally-empty wallet) prevailed. I gathered all the info, totaled up all the discounts I could muster, and left the store with nothing but a scribble-laden brochure and a business card.

If you’ve ever gotten real excited about something, then had your hopes deflated like a scuba tank shot with a 7mm rifle, then you know roughly what happened next. Before investing a hundred-ninety-nine of my hard-earned clams in an iPhone or two, I wanted to make sure it would work with my PC, my music player, and some manner of PIM syncing software. After all – my trusty iPod mini works just fine with all these things. But alas, in no particular order, the answers were “no”, “no” and “no”. Gee, thanks Apple.

As it turns out, in order to manage your iPhone’s music collection with anything other than the vendor-locked iTunes software, you’ve got to go through a process called jailbreaking. It’s a somewhat-shady but ingeniously-developed process to crack Apple’s lockdown on what apps you can run on your iPhone. With an out-of-the-box iPhone, you can only run apps that come from Apple’s App Store walled-garden – but a jailbroken phone can run other apps. Apps that Apple doesn’t want you to run. Apps that (one would have to surmise) awaken Steve Jobs in the wee hours of the morning, beaded in cold sweat at the prospect of giving iPhone owners a choice.

As it turns out, Apple’s not too keen on people managing their music with anything but iTunes – because (horror of horrors!) people just might not buy all their music from iTunes. They’re also not too keen on third-party GPS applications – which is why the iPhone still doesn’t have a turn-by-turn navigation app. Want to use your iPhone’s camera to capture videos? You won’t find an app to do the job in the App Store, because Apple won’t allow it. Want to tether your iPhone to your laptop to enjoy the 3G Internet connection? Don’t plan on doing it unless you jailbreak – and risk voiding your warranty, bricking your expensive phone and contracting syphilis.

Yes, Apple has their reasons. They want to ensure a seamless user experience – for most users. I have my reasons too: I don’t want to run Windows – an insecure, bug-infested operating system – on my PC, nor do I want to shell out premium coin for Apple’s sexier-than-it-is-useful fare. What I do want is a smartphone that adheres to some effing standards. I want to be able to drop content onto it by USB mass storage – something that every other bloody smartphone in the known universe can do. Or – here’s a shocker, folks – load it up with a damn memory card! I want to hook it to my PC without having to install a bunch of pointless bloatware. I want to invest in a piece of hardware, and not have to worry about finding my hands tied later on – by the company that sold it to me!

To be sure, the iPhone world (you know, that impenetrable bubble that forms around iPhone users when their noses are to their phones) is a magical, utopian place where none suffer and all the users are equal. But remember: some users are more equal than others. There’s no better proof of that than the news that broke from Apple today…