Apple’s phone ships next month and it does not have a 3G radio. It runs on EDGE, which is the slower data service that came before 3G and which most of Europe has been quietly moving off for two years.

Every write-up treats this as a straightforward mistake. I think it is a battery decision, and I think the more interesting problem is somewhere else entirely.

The 3G radios shipping in handsets right now are power-hungry in a way that spec sheets do not communicate. Put one in a device with a large bright screen and you are choosing between a thicker phone, a heavier phone, or a phone that needs charging before the end of the day. Apple has apparently decided that a device which lasts a full day on EDGE is a better product than one which lasts five hours on 3G, and having used several 3G handsets that need a lunchtime top-up, I am not certain they are wrong.

The awkward part is that this is the first phone whose browser is worth using. Everything I have seen suggests a real rendering engine showing real pages rather than the stripped-down markup that mobile browsers have made do with. That is genuinely new, and it is the feature most likely to change what people do with a phone.

Pairing the first browser people will actually want to use with the slowest data service available is a strange combination, and it will produce a lot of frustrated reviews.

Here is what I think matters more than either of those things.

Ask someone with a data-capable phone what their tariff allows and watch how few can answer. The pricing is deliberately opaque. There are bundles measured in megabytes, overage charges applied per kilobyte, and roaming rates that can produce a four-figure bill from a fortnight abroad. There are documented cases of people returning from holiday to bills larger than the phone cost.

Under those conditions nobody browses. They check one thing, quickly, with the anxiety of a person watching a meter. The behaviour the carriers say they want, which is customers using data heavily, cannot happen while the customer is afraid of the bill.

So the constraint on the mobile internet is not the radio. Doubling the speed of a connection nobody dares use changes nothing. The constraint is a pricing model designed for occasional text messages and never revisited, and the operators will hold onto it as long as they can because per-megabyte billing is enormously profitable.

Whichever carrier is first to offer genuinely unlimited data at a price a normal person will pay without thinking will find out what these devices are for. I do not expect that to happen voluntarily. I expect a handset maker with enough leverage to insist on it as a condition of the deal.