One of my biggest gripes with the iTunes App Store is the lack of free trials. There seems to be little in the way of Apple logistics to offer this choice to developers. That’s one reason I’ve added less than a handful of paid applications to my iPhone. I simply don’t want to risk my money by purchasing software that doesn’t meet my needs. Just because an application is popular, doesn’t mean it’s good.The grass is slightly greener on the other side of the operating system: the Android Marketplace will allow for free, limited-trial applications. The only fly in this ointment is that there still may be a cost involved, just not to the consumer. T-Mobile intends to charge developers $2 per month for any free Marketplace app that will use more than 15-megabytes per month. I’d expect that many apps would fall into this category and I’m not sure exactly how T-Mobile has any say over this anyway. Last I checked, this was the Android Marketplace, not the T-Mobile Software Shop. That’s one way to subsidize the cost of that shiny, new 3G network. Lighting up San Francisco alone cost the carrier over $322 million dollars.
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