10 reasons to hate the 3G iPhone

#1 No upgrade to the camera

The camera in the first-gen iPhone was only two megapixels with no flash. "Fair enough," I thought… "it's a first-gen product. They have to leave themselves room to move for the upgrade they'll surely put into the next-generation iPhone." No such luck. The camera in the iPhone 3G is exactly the same as the first-gen one. Still stuck at two megapixels. Still unable to cope in low-light and still no flash. Oh, and there's no video recording capability either, even though this has been found on phones for the last five years or so.

#2 No Adobe Flash support

Undeniably, the iPhone has the best web browser of any phone on the market. But when you hit a web page with Adobe Flash in it, you'll just get an empty space with a 'missing plugin' icon. Apple says Flash would run too slowly on the iPhone, but in reality, it's probably more to do with Apple wanting to promote its competing web app development technology, Sproutcore.

Apple realises the 'mobile web' is at a tipping point… if it can get enough momentum behind developers coding sites specifically for the iPhone, it will help sales of the iPhone along in the long term. (That said, unlike Flash, Sproutcore is an open standard that theoretically works in any web browser that supports Javascript, so it could be widely supported by all handset makers if their phone web browsers got better.)

#3 No instant messaging

Despite the fact that the iPhone comes with unlimited data plans (in the US at least; Australian plans haven't yet been revealed) Apple has hobbled the iPhone's ability to do instant messaging.

Rather than sending instant messages over the internet to friends, the iPhone sends them by SMS. Since Apple has great instant messaging software for Mac called iChat, this is undoubtedly a concession to phone companies. SMS is widely considered to be the most expensive data service in the world, with each message only 165 characters long but charged by phone companies at around 20c per message. Multiplied out, that equates to 1.3 million dollars per gigabyte of SMSes. (By comparison, Aussie mobile network Three offers 1GB of high speed internet usage for $15.)

Oh yeah, and forget about chatting to someone who's sitting at a computer using the iPhone. Heaven forbid you might want to chat to someone using MSN/Windows Live Chat, Google Talk, AIM, ICQ, Facebook or any of the other popular chat protocols.

Hopefully, this ludicrous situation will be plugged by third-party application developers who will develop internet-based chat clients for iPhone. However, Apple has said that it will not allow applications to run in the background on the iPhone; instead, the developers must run an internet-based service, send a message to Apple servers, which will then send a message to the iPhone to alert the user to open the app. Yes, it may save battery life on the iPhone, but no, it's not exactly convenient.

On a Blackberry, the Blackberry Messenger just sits quietly in the background. If your phone is on, so is Blackberry Messenger. It's 100% reliable. It doesn't send messages using a stupid method like SMS. It uses the Blackberry's unlimited internet access. And yes, Blackberries do have good battery life.

#4 Totally impractical for international travel
The iPhone downloads full emails, attachments and all, when you view them on the iPhone. If someone sends you an email with several megabytes of photos attached, that's how much data has to be downloaded by the iPhone. That's fine if you're in your home country and have an unlimited data plan. But go to another country and see how much it costs you — you can expect to pay up to $20 per megabyte. Your roaming charges will soon be running into hundreds of dollars.

Not to harp on about the Blackberry, but when you roam with one of them, it's quite cheap, because the Blackberry servers downscale images to perfectly fit the size of the Blackberry screen before sending them — a huge saving in data transfer charges, and messages are heavily compressed before transmission, etc. In fact, even heavy Blackberry users may be surprised to learn that they use less than 5MB of data per month.

#5 Not compatible with Bluetooth car kits or headphones
Apple has Bluetooth wireless in the iPhone, but it only works with a handful of wireless headsets. Forget talking handsfree on Bluetooth car kits or using the iPhone with stereo Bluetooth headphones. You could expect those sorts of features from the world's leading music player, but not the iP… oh, wait.

Considering Apple wants the world to take the iPhone seriously for its phone capabilities, it's truly incredible that it has hobbled the Bluetooth audio capability so much. Could it be because it wants to make money from car equipment manufacturers who build an iPod dock connector into their car stereos?

Caveat: this comment is based on what we know about pre-release versions of the iPhone 2.0 software. It's possible Apple will have fixed this in the release version of the iPhone 3G.

#6 No cut and paste
This one is truly hard to understand. Apple brings out one of the world's most advanced smartphones in terms of user interface, and somehow forgets to put in cut and paste... probably the only smartphone on the market that doesn't have it. The mind boggles. (Also something that Apple could conceivably fix by the time the iPhone 3G is released… here's hoping.)

#7 Non user-replaceable battery

It's a sad fact about rechargeable batteries: the first time you recharge them, their maximum capacity degrades. After a few hundred recharges, their capacity is down to something like half their original capacity. Normally, this is annoying, but manageable — you just swap the battery out for a new one, or get a second battery and swap between the two of them until the first battery is toast.

Not so with the iPhone. Its battery is sealed up tightly inside the nearly-impossible-to-pry-open casing (believe me, I've taken the back off an iPhone and that sucker is not meant to come apart… Apple must be replacing the casing of iPhones it services). Apple will then install the battery for you (in the US it costs $US85.95) and post it back to you. Oh, and you can pay them extra $US30 for the privilege of renting another phone from them to use in the meantime.

Not only is this massively inconvenient, it's a cunning attempt by Apple to get people to simply buy a new iPhone when the battery finally dies. People will be asking themselves… "do I pay $105.95 to get my old iPhone battery fixed, or do I pay $199.00 to buy the latest and greatest model of iPhone?" I know which one I'd pick, and I bet that's central to Apple's business plan.

#8 No MMS

So you've snapped a nice photo on your iPhone and you want to send it to a friend? You'd better hope they have email on their phone, because that's the only way you're going to be able to send it to them with the iPhone. For some reason, despite its ridiculous decision to force all instant messaging through SMS, Apple has totally left out MMS (picture/video SMSes) from the iPhone.

#9 No turn-by-turn navigation
Despite building a GPS satellite navigation receiver into the iPhone, Apple has stopped short of offering voiced, turn-by-turn navigation into the device. Yes, you can plot directions from your current position to somewhere else, and you can watch yourself as a little dot on the map, but have you ever tried doing that in a car? I have … on my Blackberry. I nearly crashed.

If you're thinking I'm being a bit overly critical (isn't it a "nice to have" feature than a necessity?) compare Apple to Nokia, which has been offering voiced, 3D, turn-by-turn navigation on its phones for a couple of years now. Having a Nokia N78 saved my bacon recently when I realised I was totally lost and didn't have a street directory with me. I also had a Blackberry with me that has 2D map routing similar to what's on the Blackberry, and it sucked, because it was like reading a map constantly while driving.

#10 Stunning hypocrisy
At Apple's last presentation on the iPhone (March 6th 2008), Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller ridiculed market leader Blackberry for the complexity of its push email service, pointing out that your messages have to pass through a RIM messaging server and a network operations centre before they're sent out to your phone. Plus you have to pay extra for the service.

With the iPhone 3G, Apple introduces MobileMe, a service that … passes your email through an Apple messaging server before it is sent through to your phone. And it costs $AUD119 per year extra. Spot any similarity with the Blackberry business model?

It seems stunningly hypocritical for Apple's to criticise the technology of the market leader in the US smartphone space, then adopt the same technologies in its own product. On the other hand, I'm glad it has… but I'm flabbergasted at Apple's audacity in working on a service while at the very same moment criticising others for doing it.

Computers and Technology

10 reasons you shouldn't get a iPhone

10. Too Expensive

Is Apple kidding us? $599 for a freaking phone? Wow...just wow. No phone is worth that much money even if it has a few "gee whiz" and "it's neat" type features. Apple has gone way, way off the deep end this time with the price of this behemoth phone. Why would anybody be foolish enough to pay that much for a cell phone? Are people that addicted to blabbing on the phone that they must pay $600 to do so? Sheesh, get a life people. Do you really want to waste your money lining the pockets of Steve Jobs and his minions at Apple? Take the $599 and do something productive with it instead of wasting it on yet another over-hyped, over-priced Apple product.

9. Tiny Storage
Well just as with the iPod, we can always count on Apple screwing us over with tiny amounts of storage space. The $499 iPhone has 4GB and the $599 has 8GB. What on earth does Apple expect people to do with that tiny bit of storage space? Think about it. The vaunted iPhone is supposed to be able to play movies as well as play songs. Well how many movies are you going to be able to store with just 4GB of storage space? And how many songs can you carry? To say nothing of your other data that you might need to tote around with you.

Apple appears to have rushed headlong into the release of the iPhone with no thought whatsoever about how starved for storage space iPhone users will soon be. And what does Jobs think is going to happen? That people will carry around a terabyte external hard disk with them to desperately try to carry their needed data? Come off it, Steve. The minimum data storage for the $499 iPhone should have been 500GB at the very least with the top of the line model having at least 800GB or preferably 1 terabyte.

8. Stylish and Stupid
There's no doubt about it that the iPhone look "stylish" when you first see it. But isn't that really the problem with all of Apple's products? They look pretty but provide very low value for the price? Do you really want to be a loser that overpays for the iPhone just to look cool for a little while? Don't forget that no matter how "stylish" you look, sooner or later other people will have an iPhone and then you'll just look stupid.

Is that what you're really after? To look stupid trying to be cooler than everybody else? Hey, you can do that without spending $600. In fact, you may have already achieved that goal just by reading this column but I'll leave that to each reader to decide for themselves.

7. Stuck With AT&T
One of the worst things that Apple ever did was to sign a five year exclusive agreement with AT&T to be the wireless provider for the iPhone. Five years! So if you use Verizon, Tmobile, or some other provider, you can't get an iPhone unless you switch to AT&T.

To date AT&T doesn't seem to have all that great of a reputation as a mobile service provider. I can't speak from experience because I've never used them but isn't it odd how a fossil from telephone service days gone by (AT&T) ended up in bed with Apple, a company that likes to pride itself on being "cutting edge." It's the telecom marriage made in hell!

What exactly was Apple thinking here? Did it deliberately decide to screw over customers on other services? We'll never know what on earth was going through Steve Jobs' head when he made this wacky decision (was his turtleneck too tight and it cut off the blood supply to his head?) but anybody on a different wireless carrier will have to live with it unless they want to switch to AT&T.

6. Edge and Not 3G
Apple's decision to go with AT&T is also costly for another reason. The iPhone apparently will be using AT&T's super-slow and crappy Edge data service instead of 3G. Wow. Another major screw-up by Apple. Are you willing to pay for a slow data connection on your "cool" iPhone? Stop and think about that for a minute. You're going to be paying for a data service that might take a few minutes to load this web page, depending on how it performs that day you use it.

Given that the iPhone is supposed to be "cutting edge", I can't imagine what Apple was thinking to release it on a service that doesn't offer 3G data transfer speeds. It's like Apple released a corvette that can only go up to 35mph. What the heck is the point?

5. No Flash or Java Support
Flash and Java are both pretty basic parts of the web experience. And yet Steve Jobs and his lackeys have arbitrarily decided to exclude them from the iPhone web experience. So much for "the internet in your pocket" blather that Jobs was spewing earlier on. It's more like the "crippled, crappy, lame version of the Internet in your pocket" instead.

No doubt though that Apple's marketing department will probably put their usual spin on this and start touting the iPhone as being "Flash-free" or "Java-free" as though both things were positives instead of negatives. And you know what? The Apple Faithful will eat it up! They'll storm out onto the Web and begin filling discussion forums and newsgroups with inane comments about how the iPhone "protects" users from evil things like Flash and Java.

I guess when you're the head of a cult, you can make people believe anything.

4. Two Year Contract and $175 Termination Fee
When you buy an iPhone you better get ready to pay out even more! You'll have to agree to a 2 year contract, whether you like it or not. And what happens if you decide to switch to another wireless provider? Get ready because you'll have to cough up another $175 to regain your freedom from the tyranny of AT&T and Apple. Talk about a ripoff!

3. No Keyboard
I'm sorry but I'm not buying the "multitouch is great" line of thinking. I don't want to be dependent on a stupid touch screen, I want a keyboard! Who knows how accurate the iPhone's touch screen keyboard will be? Early rumors suggest that it might be a disaster in the making. Do you really want to pay $599 or even $499 to find out that it's a total pain in the rear end just to text somebody and that you have no option whatsoever for a built-in keyboard? What was Apple thinking here? No hardware keyboard and a dubious, iffy software based keyboard that could be completely unusable for most people? No thanks! Put a hardware-based keyboard in the next version, Apple, and maybe it will be worth considering.

2. Crapfari Instead of Firefox
One of the most disappointing and shocking things about the iPhone is that it ships with the second (or is it third or fourth rate?) browser known as Safari. I prefer to call it Crapfari as there are just far too many sites that don't work properly with it for me to consider it a real browser. Instead of shipping with a real browser like Firefox, Apple chooses its bastard step-child of a browser. And then it has the temerity, the impudence to release the same bug-ridden piece of junk on Windows right before the launch! Could Apple be more arrogant? How many people are aware of just how bad the Crapfari browser really is and that they will have no alternative on the iPhone? I bet there will be a lot of shocked and angry iPhone users once they start trying to use the web and find that the Crapfari browser won't display their favorite sites properly. Well what did they expect from a fourth rate browser anyway?

And here's the number one reason why you shouldn't even consider buying an iPhone:

1. I'll Get to the Apple Store Ahead of You
If you've read this far then you've finally discovered the *real* reason I wrote this column.

You see, I'm out to dissuade as many people as possible from buying an iPhone so that I have less competition on Friday when I go to get mine. Yep, this entire column is nothing more than a self-serving ruse at giving myself the best chance possible to snag an iPhone on opening day.

The fewer people that are interested in the iPhone, the better my chances at getting one! So in this column I've just regurgitated all the usual FUD about the iPhone, Apple, and AT&T in a blatant attempt to discourage you from being remotely interested in buying one.

And I want one...make no mistake about it...I want an iPhone...bad! It's all I've been able to think about for the last few days...I've been dreaming of ditching my crappy Verizon phone and holding the sleek, sexy iPhone in the palm of my hand.

Yes...I must have one...and I will have one! No matter who or what gets in my way! Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssss....the precioooooooous will be ouuuuuuursssssssssss!

So don't even bother to leave your house on launch day to get an iPhone. If you do, you'll find that I got there ahead of you and bought the last one. Muhuhahahahha! Suckers!

Computers and Technology