terrbear.org

Last year, when the original iPhone was released, I bought a 4gig model on the first day. I actually didn’t even purchase it; my step mother waited in line at a store when it was released (at 6 in the evening) and she picked one up and met us at Serrano’s.

I went home that night and activated it. I was amazed. Everything seemed so well thought out. Everything activated easy peasy. I had my contacts all set up within an hour, tried out movies, music, web browsing, YouTube. Things worked so seamlessly. I have lots of fond memories of my first iPhone, also known as the first phone I didn’t hate after 3 months.

When Nate (who was the worst newborn imaginable) wouldn’t go to sleep, I could put in the earbuds and watch Colbert Report while rocking him. When I traveled around, I could listen to music. At lunch I could check my email. I hadn’t had a smart phone before, so this was all new and captivating for me.

It was a no-brainer when the 3G was announced that I’d be getting one as soon as I could. I got in line the morning of the release, only to be 5 people too far back. Oh well, I thought. I’ll get one over the weekend at the Apple Store.

So, Saturday morning, I figured I’d stroll in about half an hour before the store opened just to be safe, and would be one of the only people to get it. I told Sara that the wait couldn’t be that long, so she and Nate tagged along. Strike 1.

I arrived 30 minutes before the store was set to open, and was probably the 200th person in line. About 30 minutes after standing there, they moved us to the other side of the street (we waited outside the store) to keep us out of the sun.

We ended up waiting 4 hours to get my damn phone. Each time I’d get discouraged and be tempted to leave, I’d think, “it can’t be more than another hour.” I thought that a lot, and was wrong most of the time. Further compounding the problem, the Apple employee wouldn’t offer how much of a wait we had. He kept avoiding the question by saying that he was so wrong yesterday that he didn’t want to estimate.

So, after all of this, I activated my iPhone at the store. They wouldn’t let you leave without activating the phone, which is what took so long. Unfortunately, having it activated doesn’t mean you can use it - it just means that the phone is ready to be set up on iTunes. Also, another cool side effect of having your phone activated is that your previous phone gets disabled. So I had no phone for the remaining errands (not a huge deal, just another poorly thought out pain in the ass).

After getting the phone activated, I was ready to try things out. Wait, sorry, no I wasn’t. I was used to syncing my iPhone to my computer, but the way contacts are handled is confusing, so I told it not to sync those. Unfortunately, that means when your phone is backed up, contacts aren’t backed up. So I lost most of my phone numbers. Yay.

Ok, so after sending out a fun email explaining that I’m apparently too dumb to use the easiest phone on the planet, I got to playing with the features. I installed the Apple TV remote (which is great, when it’s hooked up) and a few stupid apps like the light saber.

Then it was time to try out the GPS. Which failed. Later I figured out that the GPS only seems to pinpoint your location if you’re on AT&T’s network, and not if you’re on wireless. Which is a little stupid, seeing how I might have wireless and still want to know where I am.

Another problem with the GPS is that it’s written to overlay with Google maps. This means that you have to, again, be connected to the Internets to get any sort of meaningful data. When you’re heading out to the lake to meet family at a restaurant, and you’re not quite sure how to get there, but you figure you’ve got an iPhone GPS so it’ll be easy, you realize that the 3G coverage on AT&T’s network is terrible. We never figured out where we were, and a cousin called and gave us directions.

The email transitioned over pretty easily, so I tried to respond to an email. The keyboard for my email application is practically unusable. The delay between touching a key on the screen and the phone registering the action is (not an exaggeration) 3-5 seconds. It’s fun typing without any sense of what keys you hit correctly and what you didn’t. It’s to the point where if the email is longer than one sentence, I’ll wait until I get to a computer to send the email.

The browser and contacts are slow as balls. Definitely slower than the previous phone. The browser has to think for several seconds before coming up, and on contacts I’ll sometimes have to wait 5-10 seconds after pressing “John Smith” to actually see a number I can dial. Further, there are times when it takes 20-30 seconds for the SMS app to open up.

While I welcomed the new price on the phone (hey, $200 is a lot easier to pull off than $500), it feels like Apple dismissed a lot of QA to keep the cost competitive. Things that should have been thought out (registration servers crashing, slow phones, 3G use) weren’t, and I went from paying for and driving a porsche to paying for and driving a civic.

I put up with terrible phones for a long time, because I didn’t know there could be anything better. The original iPhone changed that. Now, Sara makes fun of me because I bitch about the phone all the time.

I sold my old iPhone to a coworker for $50. While the phone was worth the money for both parties, I feel like I lost something. A phone that I didn’t hate. A phone that I never, ever wanted to slam against the wall. A phone that introduced new, great solutions to old problems. Now I’m back to just another old shit phone that works half the time and sells twice the features that I don’t care about.

Hopefully a software update fixes this, but until then, I’d say if you don’t need a new phone, the iPhone isn’t a step up.