Just like my older posts, I often have access to many phones and I've often reviewed them on a personal level. Well the iPhone too I have evaluated. Mind you this pertains mainly to the iPhone 3G 8GB. I know the new 3Gs is out--which I think still sucks.
Reason # (Aside from the obvious: it is ridiculously priced, ATT restricted, it's from Apple etc.)
1) It has no keypad or not even a hidden one. Most people have realized that "touch screen" isn't that cool in the long run. It is cumbersome, smudges, needs protection, slower (the processing power to register every touch slows it down), feeling a keypad button is much more efficient, especially whilst driving or doing covert texts!
2) The 4 buttons are useless. They are nice looking (chrome) but they are pretty useless--except the power button. Okay maybe the "vibrate on/off" switch is handy, but it is not really a "feature," because you need that button to quickly put it on vibrate without having to screw with the Settings menu just to accomplish this simple task. The home key is also pretty useless, it would be nice if it could be used for more things than just taking you "Home." The poor attempt to making useful by allowing you to hit it twice to access a shortcut isn't enough. That little circle button would have been a lot nicer if it would work like the circular jogging wheel on iPods. At least then I could use it to navigate and slide through media.
3) The speakers aren't that great. In fact this one, only one of them is working which is even worse. What is even more worse (worstststs?), is that if I am listening to a song or watching a video through these speakers, my hand often covers the speakers and completely muffling the sound accidentally. It happens more often than not.
4) It has no detachable battery. Seriously, it looks nice that the back of the iPhone is "smooth" and "sleek" and all that jazz, but what does it matter when that "sleek" look has to be covered up with some ugly cases to protect this overly expensive piece of garbage? Without a detachable battery, you are pretty limited to the amount of time it takes for this power hungry bells and whistles phone to drain all your battery life. It doesn't take long, especially if you use "all the apps."
5) Fails for business applications. Seriously, the commercials emphasize that they "have an app for dat," as if it is a good thing. Have you opened up a brand new iPhone? Their commercials have to say they "have an app for dat." Why? Because it comes with nothing useful. Especially when you compare it to other business phones that come with a ton of apps already installed and ready to go for business. "Let's say, you have a few apps that were opened but your memory is all hogged up and you cannot clear the memory because the iPhone doesn't give you that ability, well there's an app for dat. "Free Memory."" Really, most Smart phones have a 'task manager' that takes care of this. This is just one example.
6) Poor password handling. Apparently the iPhone gets easily confused with some of the passwords I've tried to "save" in it. For example, I created a VPN profile to my network and to eliminate a step while testing, I entered and saved my password. Even though it was entered correctly and saved, it still asks me for the password. How do I know it cannot handle the password? Well because if I do the same with a much more simple password, like "password" or "iphone" it saves it and gives me no problems. Yes it will accept the password if I manually enter it every time I access resources that require credentials, but it just seems funny it won't save it--it becomes confused.
7) No directory access. Come on, really? If you wish to browse through your directory to perhaps, oh I don't know, delete some files? You can't. (Unless perhaps if you JailBreak it.) For example, say I have an mp3 and I notice the song isn't as great as I originally thought when I synced it with iTunes, oh but wait, I can't delete it, I have to wait until I get home and turn on my computer and plug my iPhone in and delete it through iTunes.
8) No command prompt. Do they have an app for dat? Not from what I saw. . .not even an 'emulated' one. Again you have to JailBreak it. Update: (Apparently there is now, it wasn't always free though.)
9) The limited camera. While I'll admit, it has a pretty decent camera that takes pretty good pictures for what it is, it has no flash! What if it's dark? Too bad. You cannot record video either. I don't care that the "new" iPhone 3GS does, it doesn't fix the problem that the other previous iPhones do not! How can you make a modern phone that cannot do this simple task? Even crappy phones have this ability. There exists no digital zoom. Yes there's an app for dat, that can haphhazardly do that but it is something the phone should be able to do on its own.
10) Most good apps aren't free. The commercials should go like this instead, "say you such and such, and you need an app that can do this and this, well you gotta pay for dat." It's great an all that there are tons of apps, but most of the free ones are pretty limited, or are free but chock full of ads. I have 3 good applications that I find very useful, I had to pay for each of them, some aren't only a few bucks either. This only adds to the TCO of this already limited phone. Might as well pay less and get a more scalable phone.
11) No additional storage. Sure you can get a nice chunk of storage built-in your iPhone, but what if you run out from the "ton of apps" and mp3s you can't immediately delete? At least other smart phones you can practically have infinite storage using multiple storage cards.
12) Safari stays open. You can have multiple open browser windows which you can conveniently "flick" through and even close them on the fly. This of course can help with memory consumption. It's always nice to see a friendly "X" button that lets you close programs. Unfortunately this is the only place I see them, too bad you cannot close other programs this way also. When you hit the Home button of course like all other programs it doesn't close Safari--except with a "hard close" by apparently holding the home button for 6 seconds. If you don't do this and don't take the time to close every single open browser window, you will have them running in the background for the next time you open up Safari.
13) No MMS (Multi-media-Message). Since the day iPhone came out even up to the slim 3G, MMS isn't available. Why the long wait? Every other crappy phone has the feature but not the ultimate iPhone? There isn't even an "app for dat!" There were many pseudo-MMS apps that weren't really MMS, but just easier ways of having to enter a user name and password on some stupid link hosted by ATT. Even now after the v3.0.1 update, that was supposed to give the feature for MMS still hasn't for most 3G users. Unless you upgrade to the new 3Gs, it isn't available to you "yet." As if it is some new technology to revolutionize phones. It isn't, the technology has been around for a long time now and the iPhone is barely catching up on its latest release. (UPDATE: Read about it here. We will see how this turns out though of course. [see below])
14) Cumbersome to make custom ring-tones. It is much easier on other phones, even non-Smartphones.
15) Non Customizable. There isn't much to say, you just can't customize your iPhone's look, unless you (yes you guessed it) JailBreak it.
16) Expensive insurance. Other phones--for example through Verizon, you can at least get your phone covered by Asurion which only costs an extra 4.99 a month. Even ATT offers insurance for their other phones for about the same price. Not the iPhone.
17) The Novelty wears out. Fast.
18) Recent update broke Exchange. Read about it here. "According to the Apple KB on this issue, the iPhone 3GS supports device encryption, while the earlier iPhone models do not, and their recommendation is to have the Exchange administrator change the mailbox security policy to stop requiring device encryption."
There are probably a ton of more things that could be pointed out about the iPhone, aside from common freeze ups due to application hogging resources and buggy applications but we'll leave them for another time. If there are any mistakes point them out. But I don't think there are, I have been using one for 4 months now. In my opinion, I would not included it as part of our company's business model. We need to use business tools not toys. The iPhone has excellent potential to be fun, but in most cases, it seldom can really be called a 'business phone.' However on an individual basis, there may be exceptions.
Of course there are some nice features and applications that are worth mentioning, but the "bad" out weighs the good and--who cares? But I'll mention one.
The WinAdmin application is useful. It doesn't have many options, but for remote desktop use, it works great, sure there are applications like this one on other phones--I agree, I've used them. The thing that makes it different on the iPhone and the only reason I am not taking it apart to see its guts is the Pinch and Zoom features. When you remote via RDP to a remote machine you can navigate it very quickly and zooming helps see things you cannot normally see as easy on any other phone. Simply flicking the window very quickly takes you to the other side of the window and so forth. It's not like the MotoQ you use buttons to navigate, it's not like the AudioVox you use a stylus etc, it's like an iPhone, you use the dexterity of your hand. Other than that, save your money, it's basically a Mac with dialing capabilities. Sure it can be JailBroken but why go through the trouble? There really isn't any big "I gotta have this!" app out there that really impels me to JailBreak it other than a few tools and customization options that I can get on another phone without circumventing Apple's and ATT's ToS.
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