Commentary
Sorry, iPhone lovers: iStill can’t stand your iPhone.
I wrote a few months back about my experience shopping for a new mobile phone. I considered many phones, spending a couple of hours looking at the AT&T Wireless store in Homewood, IL.
The service at the store was exceptional. The clerk spent time explaining the differences between the various plans offered, and thoughtfully and carefully explained how I could get my rebate.
I spent a considerable amount of time looking at the Samsung Blackjack II, a CR Best Buy, and finally made my way to the iPhone 3G.
As I last wrote, I found it a rather clumsy device. The QWERTY keypad was entirely useless to me. I made a sincere effort to hit “keys” with my finger, only to see the wrong letter load in the browser’s address bar. It took a good 3 or 4 minutes just to type in a simple URL.
Once I finally managed to enter the correct URL, I was pleased to see my page loaded — the whole page — much more quickly than expected. It looked slick but tiny in that little screen. Eventually, I figured out how to see larger areas of the page so I could actually navigate the Web page.
That was August. I have given the iPhone several more chances when I’ve seen it in the store. The device is still clumsy. The QWERTY keypad is useless to me. The screen is simply not accurate.
Plus, I’m not impressed with the numerous reports of the short battery life of the iPhone. Doing a Google search for “battery life of iPhone” shows numerous problems iPhone users are having. The many blog entries and so-called “fixes” for the problems only reaffirm my suspicions: as a whole, the iPhone is still not ready for prime time. Apple has some wonderful tips to help users optimize battery life: minimize use of location services, like Maps, fetch new data less frequently, minimize the use of third-party applications, turn off Wi-fi, turn off Bluetooth, etc. In short, don’t use your iPhone as it was intended!
Please.
I’m quite pleased with my Palm Centro. iPhone users can call me names (my favorite was when one bright light who called me "iTarded.") But, face it: many of you have the iPhone because you think you should have it. Somehow, you are able to look past the many inadequacies of this little device because somewhere, deep down inside, you imagine that this is the phone of the future, and you own it today. When we spend a lot of money on something, we need to justify the expense.
I didn’t need to read blogs, FAQs and a list of hacks to use my phone. My phone works just fine.
