The iPhone has boggled my mind, for several reasons.
First and foremost, people I know and respect and I consider very smart have dumped their notPhones and bought iPhones, and most of them say they love them.
Honestly, it seems to me that it’s just a fad thing, be part of the cool crowd or something – except they haven’t sold enough for it to be cool. It’s like the “idea” of it is supposed to be cool or something. Maybe it’s because I never leave my basement office, but I’ve never even seen one. So far though, the greatest and most compelling feature of the iPhone seems to be that “it looks really cool” and “it’s SO intuitive!”. So, you got a new really expensive phone with a lot of flaws because, it looks good? OK. Fad.
When tons of people were standing in line for hours to buy a phone that there wasn’t a shortage for, I twittered that I really wished I had gone and bought an iPhone because it was the perfect opportunity to do a “Destroy my iPhone” video. I still wish I would have done that. Instead, the locals at Blend-Tech did one.
I’ve been reading a lot of the posts I see about the iPhone looking for a good reason to get one. I seriously cannot find a compelling reason to switch in fact, it seems like a huge step backwards to me. I have used a Treo 700w for the last year and a half and I use that as my benchmark to judge the iPhone to determine if it would be a good move to switch.
Chris Knudsen has a good post that covers some of these things, from his post I found this one from Om Malik that he linked to, the comment list is quite exhaustive and very good.
Battery
The biggest issue for me is that battery. It’s locked in the stupid phone and you have to pay money and send it in for 3 days to get it replaced if it goes bad. That’s one thing with it but, if I don’t use my phone at all, the battery will last all day with no problem whatsoever. But if I actually USE my phone, and I use it pretty hard – I use about 4,000 minutes/month, receive all my email on it, receive Twitter updates on it and text on it with tons of people. With all this activity, my battery will die after about 8 – 10 hours. At which point I simply switch it out with my other battery that’s been sitting on the charger all day or in my bag. The iPhone battery is reportedly good for 9 hours of use – that puts my MOBILE phone DEAD by about 3:00 pm. Then it’s no longer a mobile phone, it’s tethered to power somewhere. This is the strike that counts the most for me, there’s no way I want a phone that I can’t swap batteries with and I definately don’t want a phone I have to ration my use of.
E-Mail and other “Outlook Items”
Steve Rubel wrote this whole post about “Turning your iPhone into a Mobile Nerve Center” which is basically a cool sounding way to say “How to get your iPhone to do normal smartphone stuff”. He details getting it to use iMap (Exchange Server), how to store bookmarks that are seperated for when you have wifi and for when you have to use Edge, and how to get the feeds you read on your iPhone.
Um, those are ALL things that I can do just fine (without any hacks) on my Treo 700w, and I’ve been doing it forever. I don’t know if he gave up a decent phone for his iPhone, but this poor guy has to have workarounds for when he’s on the Edge network and to try to figure out how to get things to synch for his “mobile nerve center”. Just quit being haters people! Outlook/Exchange works amazingly well at this! Get a decent phone and you can have everything synched up everywhere in about 5 minutes. No hack workarounds needed.
These are huge strikes against switching to an iPhone from my Treo 700w.
Edge
I almost think I don’t need to say anything else here. I’ve got Verizon service on my phone, the internet is WAY fast. Edge is well, just old sucky technology. I don’t want Edge and I don’t want a 56k modem.
AT&T
Was anyone actually surprised that AT&T sucked for so many people trying to get their iPhones going? Please.
iTunes
As I understand it, the only way to play music on this thing (which is supposed to also be your iPod) is to have purchased the music through iTunes. Sorry, I have 12 gigs of music I didn’t purchase through iTunes.
Crappy Camera
The camera on my Treo isn’t fantastic, but it takes better pictures than what I’ve seen being taken by the iPhone. I take a lot of pics with my phone – why would I want them worse??? And you can’t record video? Pfah!
Headphone Jack
It’s just a proprietary “we want to steal more of your money” move to make the headphone jack non-standard and require you to purchase a special one just for your iPhone.
The iPod track record
I own about 6 iPods (and a zune, somewhere). The iPod track record tells me that Steve Jobs will tell us all to throw away our stupid iPhone’s and buy the newer, smaller, more storage one that’ll be out next year – for ANOTHER $600.00.
My personal experience/feelings about MacBook Pro
I forced myself to use a MacBook Pro for several months, I HATED it. A few months ago, I kicked it to the curb. Other than pretty pretty, I find NOTHING useful about Macs whatsoever. (yeah, some of that bleeds in here)
Given all these things, I can’t see how or why a reasonable person who already has a good SmartPhone that they utilize properly would switch (read downgrade) to an iPhone.
