Why my iphone sucks!

As I get a little older my eyes are not as optimized as they used to be for reading and the basic up close tasks, so last November I dumped my blackberry.  It has those tiny little buttons and it was a pain in the ass grabbing reading glasses every time I needed to use it, I ordered an iphone as a replacement mainly because of the larger everything, bigger letters for texting and big easy to read keyboard when I did need to manually dial a number.

I was looking at getting the google phone at the time but it had only just come out & wasn’t well-developed enough yet for me to be willing to commit, and I would have had to change carriers and since my business line is my cell phone, I really did not want to deal with that either, so I went with the iphone (3gs).

I regret (understatement) choosing the iphone, looking it as a phone only and nothing else (85% of my usage of it is just as a phone), the iphone is not a very good phone, in fact it really should be called the “idontphone” since it drops so many calls.  I am in the same places I have always been in when it comes to making calls, mostly from home and the entire time I had the blackberry it never dropped even one call (neither had the previous phone), the iphone drops calls constantly or as often as not does not even connect when dialing out, I simply get a “call failed” message, I would say at least 20% of my calls get dropped, or do not go through and I am being pretty generous with 20%.

As a Speaker Phone – It blows!

Most of the time when I am at my desk I prefer to use the speaker phone and the speaker phone on the iphone sucks mainly because most of the time I can’t turn up the volume up high enough to hear the people on the other end.  Once in a while I will get a call and its loud and clear coming through the speaker, but more often than not I am holding the speaker up to my ear almost as in it’s not on speaker… just as an FYI… if I switch off the speaker it’s usually too quiet on the regular phone as well…. so let’s go with it generally sucks as a phone. My eyes may be going, but my hearing is just fine, and again it is a problem I never had on my blackberry or the previous phone either.

How is the iphone battery life?

The iphone battery life sucks as well, my last phone I would only have to charge every few days, this thing is like a newborn that needs feeding every few hours, god forbid you should get it too far from the tit, or you are screwed.  Of course you can extend the battery life by turning off most every feature on the phone (the biggest power suck being 3g), and that begs the question then what’s the point of having a smart phone in the first place.

How about the fast 3g connection?

I can’t complain too much about 3g making my battery too dead because if I turn 3g on at home I will drop up to 70% of my calls instead of 20% as it usually does, since I have a home office and my cell is my business line, it is a bit of a problem.  So I have to turn 3g on when I’m away from my desk to get ok reception, but off when I am at my desk, a task that is buried in the phone settings and wastes enough of my time to piss me off…. I know shocker, me pissed… lest we not forget that when I do change the networks, my phone is unusable until it picks up on the different signal, something that is usually not instant!

Since I am usually out and about when I have the 3g turned on (when I remember to) I can’t bitch too much about its speed, but it really doesn’t seem to much faster (if at all) than whatever the connection was on my blackberry.  So is 3g all that, no it is not, it is more an annoyance than a feature for me.  The photo is a screen capture of my iphone in my living room and the signal strength when I use 3g, impressive isnt it.

Lets talk iphone apps!

One of the major selling points of the iphone is the vast number of apps available for it, big whoop, once you actually get the thing and look at the apps available about 90% of them are pure shit or they are so laden with advertisements that they are almost unusable (I have removed more than one because of that).  I do understand the app developers need to make a living & a free app usually has ads all over it so the developer can make a little cash, with most of the apps once you buy it the ads go away, fair enough but at least make it usable in the mean time.

Regardless you have to wade through an ocean of garbage to get to the occasional gem, I was looking forward to getting the iphone and the availability of all those apps and the rewards of having them, the reality is 70% of the time I install them and never use them again until I finally delete them off the phone, or they do not live up to what they say.

Example: I purchased an app called gpush, the idea of this is to help save your battery… and you already know why that is a must have, you install gpush tweak a few settings and instead of your phone having to make the trip to gmail every so often to see if you have mail, gpush sends your phone a notification that you have mail only when you do, and then you tell your phone to pull your mail.  Seems like a great way to save a little battery and its only a $1.99, so… I’m in.

Well it worked “most” of the time, then it didn’t work most of the time, then it worked sometimes, but mostly not, then it stopped working all together. I email the people who made it, no reply… I get onto their site and try every email address on the site…every single email bounces back… in the mean time there is a fairly old note on the site saying that they are aware of the issues and are working hard to resolve them..translation, we just gave up….bummer about your two dollars.  If you go to the app store as of the date I am writing this, it’s still for sale, but with a mile of complaint reviews below it. I wonder how many people still purchase it?

Not everything is bad in the app world there are a few I have downloaded and used quiet a bit, the main one I use more than anything is the one I keep my shopping list on, do I need a smart phone for that, not hardly!  There are a few games I use when I am board and stuck waiting somewhere for whatever & I usually do not pay for games I get the free ones listed on lifehacker’s deals of the day section.

Overall the apps can come in handy, but most of the time they go unused, if I were stuck on a train every day for a commute I would probably be more into them, but as a busy person, they are mostly “just there”

Regardless of what I install I usually use: phone, texting, the occasional email, and my calendar and reminders, and most any cell phone can do those things these days. So don’t be fooled by the  amazing life-changing apps, they are not amazing or life-changing, it’s mostly just toys.

WOO HOO, I got itunes!!!!!!!  Can I sync that for you?

If you have an iphone you are forced to use itunes, a piece of software I have come to quickly despise. You must be a windows or mac (bummer if you are a Linux) I am BTW, a linux user…. I knew the phone required one or the other to be installed, and I have windows (both xp and 7) installed as a virtual machines within my linux computer.  Just by my saying that you might get the impression I am a bit more tech savvy than the average cranky older person and I like to think you would be correct.  I’m the old guy the young guys call when they can’t figure it out, so It’s not like I do not know my way around a piece of software.  I also have a sweet powerhouse of a laptop (running xp), that I run the itunes software on, it became quickly apparent that itunes was a bit too high-strung to cope with virtual usb ports and other such nonsense.

I am also not a big giant blackberry promoter, it was just my last phone so it’s the easiest to compare the iphone to it, the other part of it is, it simply worked without any hassle or bullshit or hoops to jump through.  If I wanted to add music onto the blackberry or remove it, I plugged it into ANY computer dragged the music into the folder on the BB and job done, same thing with the photos or data.  It was simple straightforward and just plain worked, no software to install, no accounts to open, not restriction about what computer I need to use, no bullshit sync gizmo that constantly deleted what I didn’t want deleted and ignored what I wanted added.

As you might have guessed by now I’m no itunes fan either, what a needy pain in the ass piece of software that is, I get apple is the new microsoft, and its all about getting into your pocket and tying you to their music store and locking down the player so only they have control…. but OMG do you have to make it such a giant pain in the ass!!! Seriously! I can’t tell you the amount of time I have wasted dicking around with this fucking crap software, it is a nightmare.  I would be here for an hours if I were to write a litany of all the time suck bullshit I have endured just to get a photo on or off or add a goddamn piece of music to my phone.  You might be getting the slight impression by the dirty mouthed tone this has taken….well more  dirty mouthed than usual anyway… that I am a bit intense about this awful software and rightly so…. if you want your time WASTED  OFTEN… by all means… get some itunes love.

Ease Of Upgrade! MY ASS!!!!! Fuck You Apple!

This one is related to the itunes bs…  I sometimes astound myself at my blundering willingness to believe, in this case it was that if I upgraded my iphone to the os4 I MIGHT finally get better reception.  I officially confess I am a dumb-ass, I plug-in my idontphone, then itunes says….hey dumb asshole I have an update & would really like to hose you, can I?  Of course I agree after all its itunes, what could possibly go wrong.

It is supposed to work like this, you plug it in, it backs up your phone, installs the new os, restarts your phone, installs all your data back from the restore it took at the beginning of the process, job done.  Well in my case not hardly, it did everything up to the point where it restarted, then it tossed some non-informative error number onto the screen, and said it was done….. hmmmmm…  Doing a bit of googeling and I found out that error code was indeed, useless… there were thousands of hits about it and no answers, apparently it officially means… “something fucked up, bummer, and I am not going to help you fix it”.

Im not going to list the step by step, but it took 5 hours and 2 different computers to get my phone to boot up, and actually be usable again & for a while there I seriously thought all was lost, well in a way it was lost, because it did LOSE ALL MY INFORMATION.  I got it running and managed to get the apps I had back on it, but every single app lost its data, my contacts were all gone and all my photos were gone. I had to buy a $25.00 piece of software to extract my data out of the backup file it took… yes, that backup was good and all my info was there, it just wouldn’t actually reapply it.  So I had to buy this software, extract my contacts and info and photos then import them into my google contacts, then export them into my phone.  Except for the photos of course, we covered that drag and drop thing earlier, the simple solution there was (after setting up my ALL email accounts… ALL OVER AGAIN) was to mail the photos to myself then download them onto the phone, and no, as you are most likely thinking, that wasn’t time-consuming at all!

Of my photos, some were totally lost, apparently it did not backup all of them. Every single app was like I had never used it before, so I had to slowly over the next couple of days reconnect EVERYTHING, the one thing that totally pissed me off was I have an app that keeps usernames and passwords locked down, like a little secure vault.  It Erased EVERYTHING, and the next day I get a push notice from the app letting me know they had heard there was a bug and if I upgrade I might lose all my data…. oh… wow… thanks for that heads-up!!!

Upgrade bottom line: this is the LAST ONE my phone is ever getting, I am modifying the old saying “If it works, don’t fix it.” for my phone and going with “Even if it works badly, it’s better to go with that than the bullshit you will have to go through if you try to fix it and if you fail, your screwed out of a phone at all.” I know that’s just a tiny bit more verbose, but I’m going with it for now, I think I am going to print it out and tape it to the idontphone cable.

Summary:

This thing sucks kinda bad! If you are thinking about purchasing an iphone I suggest you rethink it, get most anything else, that is of course you would rather look good holding it, since you cant actually make a phone call most of the time… I am pretty convinced that the apps are only there to keep you busy while you wait to get some place you can find a signal! Android, here I come!

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