A Love Lost – My iPhone(s) And Me

Ah, the iPhone. What a wonderful and glorious bit of technology. I first got onto the iPhone train with a 3G, and it was love at first sight. I became an app god (in my eyes), and blasted out emails and tweets from everywhere.

I still do, but after using iPhones for coming up on two years, I am ready to cut the cord. There has been so much discussion of numerous aspects of the iPhone, especially the App Store, that a fresh look at the total phone experience is in order.

I deal with my iPhone all day, every day. So, even though I am no noted Apple expert, my perspective here is a fair one. I have a suspicion that I am not alone in my sentiments. Actually, I am positive. Read the tech blogosphere, a large number of people are leaving.

To begin, the iPhone is a terrible phone. That is, the call quality is worse than my first flip phone (sans built-in camera!). It drops about a third of my calls, and refuses to find any service quite often. It is annoying to have to put the phone into and out of airplane mode just to make a phone call.

The longer that I have had my two iPhones (the first one did this when I dropped it), the worse they have become. Snappy at first, they both began to lag and catch. My current iPhone is so slow, that to just open text messages takes on the order of ten seconds. Try that 15 times a day, especially after you just took it out of airplane mode to get service, just to read the text you missed.

It’s damn annoying, and for the amount of money that I paid for the phone and continue to pay for the service, I don’t think it’s fair. I pay premium to get premium; they are not keeping up with their half of the deal.

It gets even worse if you have a good deal of data on your iPhone. I had to pull most of the music from it, just because it lagged all the worse when it was loaded with gigabytes of tunes. Metallica stayed, but most of the Nas had to go. It was a bit flapping to have a device that seemed almost capable of doing so much, but was so flawed that it fell just short nearly everywhere.

What took Apple so long in bringing search to the built in email application? It was a fun time there for a year or so, always having to boot the browser, just to do an email search. Here is a little tip, non searchable email is worthless. The iPhone almost does so many things well.

The on-screen keyboard is also a laggy inaccurate bit of work. It still thinks that when I want to type “hell” I really meant “he’ll,” even after I have told it not to do so for 18 months. That is a lot of times saying no thank you, only to have it just keep on, keepin’ on.

These may seem like small things, but are just a sample of the pet peeves that the iPhone has. The moment you lose the mentality that simply because it is an iPhone, it is perfect, the phone will bug you more by the day.

I have submitted apps to the app store, and have had them rejected for ridiculously negligible reasons. And that is my final complaint, the last straw. My good developer friend called me out on this a while back: “how can you still support a platform that abuses developers as much as Apple does?” I had to think about that.

It really came to me, the App Store does have some gems in it to be found no where else, but the way that apps are let in, and kept out programs, is something that I cannot support. It is unfair, and supports a very walled garden. Two things I dislike.

Mulling over all of my complaints, which are only exacerbated by the lack of approved tethering, and the high price of Apple’s peripherals, I made my choice. This means that I am going to move away from the iPhone when my contract expires, if not before. Odd, I am the type of person who is supposed to be the hardest core iPhone fanatic, and I am so tired of the hardware/software that I have tufts of hair about my chair.

I am not alone Apple. Get your act together, and fix your phones.