Immersion Worship

I recently had an iPhone forced upon me by The Powers That Be. For the last two years, I’ve happily lived my connected life in the safe and functioning world of BlackBerry. No longer is that the case; I was forced to switch to the iPhone. Now, I know quite a few iPhone owners, and they all make a fuss about how awesome the iPhone is. Sorry guys and girls, I just don’t see it. The last couple of weeks have been some of the most technologically frustrating I’ve experienced since Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Apple really didn’t design the iPhone well from a functionality point of view; they just took a mediocre idea and shined it up and made it really slick.

This isn’t just a broad sweeping claim that I can’t back up either. When you consider that pretty much every Windows Mobile based smartphone, and pretty much every BlackBerry, can achieve some of the most basic of usability functions, it astounds me that Apple, of all companies, would either be so short sighted as to not realize what a user needs (or their focus groups sucked), or make a cognitive decision to deprive users of these functions. What functions? Where shall I start:

1. You can’t copy and paste on an iPhone. When I discovered this, I literally stood and stared at the screen for 3 or 4 minutes in disbelief, trying to convince myself that I was just not doing it right. Copy and paste has been around since the dawn of time, yet the iPhone can’t do it. That’s like manufacturing a car that has no steering wheel. Now, someone has developed a framework to introduce this functionality, but it doesn’t work with any application that isn’t built using that framework. No copy and paste. Unbelievable.

2. You can’t set the homescreen in Safari. Generally speaking, I don’t want to see the last page I viewed as my homescreen every time I launch Safari. Enough said.

3. The camera sucks. It’s like one of those early 1st generation digital cameras. Pictures taken in the sun are badly washed out and the focus is fuzzy. Considering my BlackBerry Curve had a camera on it that rivalled my wife’s Canon SureShot, and is half the price of the iPhone, this really is a disappointment.

4. No ‘always on’ IM connectivity. Well, let me readdress that. There’s no native IM at all. Not even iChat, which is silly by itself considering it’s is proprietarily Apple. There are third party IM applications available in the app store, and they’re pretty good - they let you connect to most major IM services with just one client. However, there is one major design flaw in the iPhone’s architecture that makes these applications lose a great degree of usability: The application must be open for you to be connected. Go back to the main screen, and you’re disconnected. Launch another application and you’re disconnected. Lock the iPhone and you’re disconnected. In other words, there is no ‘always on’ IM connection. And since that’s what IM is built on, Apple’s “no background applications” policy is very lame.

5. No real push mail service. Yes, I know people will go “ahh, but you do if you have Yahoo Mail or Mobile Me”. Not true. First of all, I don’t have a Yahoo account, so that point is null and void. Secondly, even the services provided by Mobile Me (I’ll probably post my thus-far disappointing experiences with Mobile Me sometime soon as well, since that’s also a rather significant letdown) and Yahoo Mail are not true push mail. Those systems use a ‘ping’ system; when an email arrives, the services sends a ping packet to the phone to tell the phone that there is new email, then the phone reaches out and pulls the email. That’s not push mail. That’s pull mail. And it’s a very power-inefficient way of doing things.

6. And speaking of power inefficiency, the battery life sucks. Again, I compare it to my BlackBerry. With EDGE, Bluetooth, and WiFi all enabled all the time, with fairly signficant use, I would recharge every 48 to 72 hours. On the iPhone, with EDGE (No 3G), Bluetooth, and WiFi all enabled all the time, I get about 16 hours of limited use out of it. Less if it’s a particularly busy day with lots of calls or emails. Enable 3G and it’s pointless; dead inside 6 hours with hardly any usage. This is a big disappointment for a mobile device. Even the 3G power usage is baffling; there are plenty of 3G devices in operation around the world that have signficantly more battery life with 3G usage.

7. No Bluetooth file transfer. This one just confuses me. Bluetooth is an old standard and old technology. It’s very simple technology as well at software level. With the iPhone, other than to attach an ear piece, there’s no value in it. I can pair my phone with my MacBook, but I can’t do anything with it; no modem support, no file transfer, no sync support. Also, if you have one of those bluetooth earphone things, you can’t play music through them. There’s none of that over WiFi either. Lame lamity lame lame lame.

8. No voice dialling. That’s really disappointing. Again, very simple technology, very widely available in many many phones, and something I used to use a lot.

9. Notes apparently don’t go anywhere. I make a note on my iPhone, but it doesn’t sync anywhere. Not such a huge deal for me since I use EverNote, but it’s a bit confusing and seems to make the function redundant.

10. No custom ringtones. This is incredibly retarded. Apple have given me a phone that can play music, but I can’t use any of my music as a ringtone (again, like the vast majority of smartphones do). Instead, I have to buy a ringtone on iTunes? That’s utterly rubbish. As are the included ringtones.

11. The Touchscreen keyboard can’t keep up with me. Missing letters and incorrectly guessed predictive text hampers productivity and is irritating and frustrating.

12. The OS is a little buggy. I’ve noticed, for example, that Safari becomes pretty much unusable if I’ve got the iPod pumping out some tunes. That’s not a big issue for me, but is indicative of some of the QA issues that the iPhone suffers from.

That’s no small list, folks, and if I had the choice, I’d be back on the BlackBerry at a moments notice. I have gained absolutely zero functionality from having an iPhone, and I have lost plenty. This is not forward progress.

I’m sure others of you have switched from BlackBerry to iPhone voluntarily, or, like me, have not had a choice in it (work issued device etc.). How have you learned to deal with the iPhone’s many flaws? Share your experience!