iPhone (finally)

I’ve been meaning to write about the Apple iPhone since June 29, but I had been unusually busy that I simply neglected to write anything at all. I’ve been working on the weekends, hanging out with recently-engaged Lucy while she visited Garth, playing sports and getting seriously hurt subsequently, watching the famous fireworks in Chicago before Independence Day, celebrating the holiday itself, throwing a dinner party, going to the Taste of Chicago festival, hanging out with friends till 03:30 in the morning, and tailgating before and attending the Dave Matthews Band concert with Guster headlining.

Phew! Even thinking and writing all that down pretty much drained the shit out of me. But now that I have some free time (sort of), I guess I’ll write something useful instead of snippets of news and what not. Remember on January 9, I wrote in my blog that I wanted to get the iPhone in less than an hour from when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone? Well... June 29 has come and passed. What came of it?

On Friday, June 29, I rounded up Sabine and Cesar for a happy hour at McCormick & Schmick’s on Wacker. The whole point was to check out the iPhone, which was released that day at 18:00 at the Apple store as well as some AT&T stores throughout downtown. But I’m not one to wait in line for any huge launch, like Philadelphia Mayor John F. Street, who actually waited nearly 15 hours in line to get the tech gizmo while ignoring his civic duties. Knowing that a store can’t possibly sell out on the first day, I wisely decided to spend my early evening drinking beer and eating finger food at happy hour, and waited till the news crews have packed up their cameras.

As I walked by an AT&T store along State Street after happy hour, I laughed at the people waiting in line to purchase the iPhone. Before heading over to the Apple store, I also managed to go shopping at Nordstrom Rack to kill some time before diving into the mosh pit that was the Apple store iPhone frenzy. Lucky for me, I found myself a new pair of work shoes and a pair of casual shoes. Nice!

Finally, when I went to the Apple store around 20:30, the line of people had disappeared, and all I could see was the temporary crowd control ropes along the sidewalk all barren. I simply walked right into the store, and waited behind a rather short line of people waiting to check out an iPhone on display. I would say that there were probably 20 or so iPhones on display. But I was smart, as I went to the back of the store where there were less people congregating around the display devices unlike the front of the store.

I have read and kept up with all news related to the iPhone between January 9 and June 29, and have decided that perhaps it was worth spending the 599 dollars with the known limitations and pitfalls. I was so ready to whip out my American Express Gold card and wait in the ridiculously long line of people waiting for the check-out register. But after just a few minutes waiting for some non-technical folks drooling over the phone, I was amazed that it was finally time for me to hold the much talked about device.

After playing with the iPhone for a little over 20 minutes (hey, if I was going to spend $600 that night, I was going to dig deep first, because after all, it was my very own hard-earned $600 I’ll be plunking down), I was simply disappointed and irritated. I realized quickly that this revolutionary gadget was not all that revolutionary! I thought the concessions I was going to make in order to purchase the iPhone was all the disappointments there were, I quickly found out that what I knew beforehand was simply 90% of the pitfalls. The other 10% of the pitfalls, which were not reported by early reviewers and rumors from Apple insiders, simply tipped me over the delicate balance between making the purchase and not.

Obviously I walked out of the store empty handed, save for the two pairs of shoes I had been lugging around since visiting Nordstrom Rack. Otherwise, I would have written a review with pictures of the iPhone the very next day.

Here is the list of all the new disappointments that I discovered that fateful night, which I will call the 10% factors:

1. Screen re-orientation: Despite what was said as revolutionary and shown in numerous television adverts, the automatic screen re-orientation based on how you hold the device is an utter piece of crap. Rather than building that functionality into the operating system layer, it was only a function of three applications: iPod, YouTube and Safari (web browser). And even worse, this function did not behave the same!

In the iPod application, the Cover Flow view would get turned on when you turn the iPhone 90 degrees in one way or another. But the sad thing is that if you turn it 90 degrees clockwise, the Cover Flow view simply became upside down, instead of being smart enough to turn it right side up. It was only designed to work if you turn it 90 degrees counter-clockwise! What the...?!?

Then the YouTube application or any video viewing application only allows you to watch it in the 90 degree counter-clockwise mode. Not regularly held mode. Huh? That doesn’t make sense to me, and shows how inflexible the iPhone can be when it comes to the extremely basic functionality!

2. Ring tone selection: For years, Nokia and other manufacturers have learned what consumers and end users wanted: setting our own ring tone based on any music file we have on the device, whether it be MP3 or a midi file. But what do you know? The iPhone only allows you to set ring tones based on what came with the iPhone, and what you can purchase from AT&T! What the...?!? You would think a revolutionary phone would take great ideas that have been around forever and improve on it, not take away bits and pieces of a culminated pool of great ideas!

3. Bluetooth that is utterly useless: The great thing about Bluetooth is that you can connect with other Bluetooth-enabled devices and do cool and fancy things together. One of the most important things about Bluetooth is the ability to transfer files wirelessly. For example, while at happy hour, Cesar sent me a picture of a cute chick he saw on the train from his Sony Ericsson phone to my Nokia phone. Just like that. And similarly, he liked a song that I had on my phone, so I sent it to him via Bluetooth. Just like that. Cool, right? This has been a rather useful feature of Bluetooth that has been around for years, yet for some reason, Apple decided to turn off the file transfer profile of Bluetooth! What in God’s name were they thinking?!?

4. Google maps without GPS: So what if you can use Google maps to get directions and find locations? It is not exactly revolutionary and something to brag about if the iPhone does not have GPS capability, something which several other phones already sport for over a year! Hell, my Nokia N91, which is a smartphone based on the Symbian operating system, is capable of running Google maps! All I have to do is go to Google and download the exact same application for Symbian! Likewise, people with Windows Mobile phones can download the same thing for their Microsoft operating system! So, uhm, exactly what is revolutionary and cool about this if I don’t have GPS like some other mobile devices?!?

5. Virtual keyboard that is not so smart: Seriously, I knew that people would have to get used to the virtual keyboard that is without any tactile feedback through time to learn how to use it. And as an Asian with way smaller fingertips than the average American, even I had a hard time typing away. I’m not exactly ranting against this particular design, but rather I’m disappointed that they didn’t take advantage of the re-orientation feature of the iPhone. You would expect that if you turn the iPhone 90 degrees counterclockwise, you would get a wider keyboard that is spaced out more, right? No way! Oh wait, I remember now... The screen re-orientation feature is NOT part of the operating system! Doh!!!

6. Useless camera: What can you do with the built-in camera with the iPhone? Nothing except point and shoot! Wait, this coming from the company that included built-in cameras in their top-of-the-line notebooks and LCD screens for a while? I asked an Apple employee why I couldn’t zoom in on shots. His response was that the camera didn’t have optical zoom, so it wouldn’t have mattered if it had digital zoom; you could always crop it later on. Well, if there was a stupid answer I have ever heard, it was that. I know that the picture quality on digital zoom is not that great, but the biggest benefit of being able to zoom in digitally before snapping the picture is composition, the most rudimentary aspect of photography! Apple, with their super smart programmers couldn’t include some basic software to take care of that?!?

Worse yet, it cannot record videos... Even my previous Nokia 7610 could record unlimited length videos as long as your memory has the space for it! And the 7610 isn’t exactly an advanced phone. Although it was based on the Symbian operating system, it was a precursor of the current generation of smartphones. And the Apple iPhone is supposed to be the next generation of smartphones? Come on!!!

7. Select, copy and paste: This is what irked me the most. A revolutionary phone based on the powerful Mac OS X operating system did not have any way for users to highlight, select, copy and paste text from the address bar of the web browser (or some other applications)? What the hell?!? This is so basic of any operating system that you would think a smart eight grade programmer can add! If I happened upon a very cool site, but it had a long URL like the City of Chicago’s website for the "Things to Do" section like so: http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalSubChannelAction.do?
BV_SessionID=@@@@0706582129.1184139159@@@@&
BV_EngineID=cccfaddlghdjikjcefecelldffhdffn.0&
channelId=-9004&topChannelName=Residents
I would like to be able to select just a portion of the URL sans Session ID that I can copy and send to my friend. But no, I simply can’t do that. Why? Please don’t make me state the obvious...

8. Financial raping in the ass: When I first heard the news of the iPhone, I was particularly surprised at the unprecedented announcement of the exclusive partnership with AT&T for five years. Although exclusive partnerships are nothing new, the fact that it is five years is extremely unusual! I didn’t know what was to come, as pricing information of rate plans were under tight seals. Although my friend Changren pointed out that this is an issue with the wireless carrier, not Apple, I believe they are both equally at fault here because of this exclusive deal they have going on. Why do I have to pay an extra $20 for an unlimited data plan if I have the iPhone? My current Nokia N91 phone has both 3G and EDGE data technologies and my current regular unlimited data plan already allows me to browse "just the Internet." So why then is it more expensive to access the same data pipeline if I’m using the iPhone? After all, my Nokia N91 doesn’t render web sites in the "watered down version of the Internet, or the mobile version of the Internet, or the kinda sorta looks like Internet Internet" either! So if you take out everything my phone can do, then the only difference you’re left is that you are paying $20 a month just for the video voicemail service. Holy shit! Talk about an ass raping and fleecing of the American consumers!

Worse yet, the iPhone is not even capable of running on 3G technology, which allows you to have faster download speeds. You are forced to use the older EDGE technology! Granted, AT&T only has 3G networks in five major metropolitan cities (Chicago included) and EDGE everywhere else where GSM is available, but I cannot imagine that consumers are being forced to pay extra for slower shit! It’s like $35 a month for cable or DSL modem service at your home, but to get regular phone dial-up service by itself, you will have to pay an extra $20 on top of that! Especially when there is no need for AT&T to recuperate the cost because the iPhone is reportedly 100% unsubsidized! And all those people walking out of the Apple store with the iPhone in hand are okay with that? I’d say they’re idiots!

After experiencing and learning of the aforementioned eight additional pitfalls, I was so frustrated as a user that I stopped exploring the iPhone and realized that my Nokia N91 allows me to have a more intuitive user interface experience with more technological punch than the iPhone. To me, the iPhone’s only revolutionary advancement is multitouch user interface. Other than that, it failed miserably in all points of user interface basics. All Nokia and any other phone manufacturers have to do is to add a similar multitouch user interface to their existing phones and that in and of itself would have leapfrogged the iPhone immediately. And it isn’t all that hard to do. That is a pretty sad thing for a "revolutionary" smartphone.

It’s like sports cars that can go really fast, but incapable of performing the most basic tasks such as turning and stopping. Sheesh...

Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t want an iPhone. After all, it does have a cool factor that no other smartphone can touch. But I’m just waiting for the next iteration of the iPhone which will hopefully have 3G, GPS and full Bluetooth technologies; as well as radio, motion picture capture and multi-format music playback capabilities; and improved software that will take care of the severe limitation in functionality of the phone. And even then, I will still not buy an iPhone until the GSM SIM card locking mechanism is breakable. After all, I could care less about the video voicemail, and would prefer I not spend the extra $20 and still maintain my regular unlimited data plan with AT&T.

Update: Good news! Apparently most of the software issues that I have been griping about are rumored to be fixed in conjunction with the release of Mac OS X Leopard. Let’s hope this pans out, as this will be a step towards the second iteration of the iPhone.