Top 10 reasons for and against the iPhone 4

2. No Flash
Iain Thomson: Technically you could class this with the first point, but it's such a topic du jour I thought we'd do it separately.

Apple maintains that Flash is buggy, sucks power and doesn't belong on smartphones. Everyone else seems to be fine with it and, while it's not the most mobile-friendly bit of code in the book, it does have its uses, as any internet user will tell you. HTML5 is the next logical step, and it has a lot of Flash developers hitting the textbooks to update their skills.

Flash isn't absolutely essential but it's pretty high on the list of things people want to use on the internet. No-one knows what caused such close chums as Adobe and Apple to fall out, but the result benefits no-one. The stand against Flash, in my opinion, is not about code viability but politics. IT has enough problems without this kind of horseplay.

Shaun Nichols: Flash may be a battery hog with security flaws and have the stability of a child's tree house, but it's also used by a great many developers and web sites.

This is where Apple's attitudes about its products can rub people the wrong way. The company may be trying to keep its devices secure and deliver the best product possible, but they're also telling the users that they don't know what is best for themselves and they're not smart enough to make the decision themselves.

The least Apple can do is give users the option. Add Flash support to the iPhone, disable it by default and add an option into the 'settings' panel to activate Flash content. Unfortunately, these days Apple seems to prefer telling users what they want over listening to what users say they want

1. Apple's walled garden
Shaun Nichols: Apple's not really known as a company that plays well with others, and nowhere is this more apparent than with the iPhone.

If you want to get software for your iPhone, you have to use Apple's App Store and iTunes. There is the option of bypassing the controls by jailbreaking your phone, but that process is not recommended to novice users, and OS updates often disable the jailbreak and can sometimes render the handset unusable.

If you want to develop software for the iPhone, you have to register with Apple and submit your product for the company's approval.

Apple says that the reason for such tight controls is to keep the platform, and its users, safe from malware infection, but there's also the business angle. Developers aren't allowed to offer any products that compete with Apple's in-house offerings. Recently the company also banned developers from using certain ad networks.

If you remember, these are just the sort of practices that led to Microsoft and Intel's respective anti-trust cases, and there are rumblings that Apple is already in the cross-hairs of government regulators.

Not only have users and developers paid for Apple's tight controls, but the company itself may soon suffer for its paranoid approach.

Iain Thomson: We had some discussions on this one, quite heated at times, and it could have taken two or three talking points on its own. This really is the key philosophical problem with Apple.

Right now Apple is like a partner with issues. If you want to use the hardware you have to buy into the entire ecosystem, however scary that is.

ITunes used to be a great bit of code but now is a bloated Elvis-like application that waddles through your system to do a halfway passable job. One can only hope it doesn't expire in the waste basket in the same way. But the rest of Apple's infrastructure is just as worrying.

We're already seeing anti-trust regulators looking into Apple's platform deals, and I suspect we'll see much more action ahead. Apple is about to discover what it feels like to be in the spotlight of regulators, not as the plucky underdog but as a corporate force that harms competition and choice.

At the moment Apple reserves the right to choose what it runs on its platform. That's all well and good if it were done on a technical basis, but Apple is also reserving the right to block satire, pornography or what it deems 'questionable' internet content.

That's not something for a service provider to do, it's a job for an individual, and I'm concerned at the extent to which one company can infringe on my liberty.