iPhone Sort of Working

The other day, I took my iPhone back into AT&T and Apple. Back-to-back. I finally got the iPhone working. Sort of.

• GPS Nominal: The GPS shows Latitude & Longitude. There was a third party app to download & install. It doesn’t come native. Also, the GPS only works in AT&T tower range. It is not really GPS, and doesn’t pick up the GPS satellite signals at all. Caveat emptor. Don’t venture into real wilderness and hope to survive with your iPhone.

• Email Inbound: Rather than get email via .mac (MobileMe), I am now getting it from SpamArrest. However, I can't really control the outbound address I am sending from. I would prefer if the email outbound used petercorless@mac.com, rather than @spamarrest.com. I don’t want to dick with it, so I just don’t use it for email.

• Touch Screen still Touchy: The touch screen only interacts with fingertips and skin. No stylus. No pen or pencil point. Just a human touch. Which means it is as responsive as trying to steer a car wearing two basketballs for gloves. So I don’t use it to type with.

• Phone Coverage Sporadic: Sometimes I get a signal. Many times I don’t. At Wolf Camera, showing my iPhone to Scott, who works at the Apple Store at Stanford on alternate days, I showed him my phone. He called it from his own iPhone. Side-by-side. It went straight to voicemail. Not even a ring. “That shouldn’t do that,” he sagely opined. I quite agreed.

• No Built-in Help: The product had no built-in tutorial or help. It felt very 1984 all over again. “How do I use this?” “That is a very good question. Guards, arrest this man!” Finally I went to the Palo Alto Store, for the umpteenth time it seems. I got a Bluetooth headset which I will likely lose in the first week of ownership, and a clerk showed me how to stop some of the annoying “features” like shutting down within 60 seconds.

• No SD chip slot: What the...? Who thought lack of expandibility and portability of data was a good idea?

• Lack of a single-ear bud: They gave me this cute 2-ear bud, like I as going to use it as an MP3 player. I already got an iPod. 2 actually. But since I spend so much time dinking around trying to get my iPhone and my Mac and my Treo to work, I haven’t had time to actually get any more technological devices set up. Anyway, for a phone, I have no desire for 2 earbuds. Especially when I want to do hands-free driving. I want ONE ear bud, thank you. Apple doesn’t sell any. So they sold me a Bluetooth ear thingy. Which has no tether so I’ll likely drop it and lose it like the Bluetooth thingy I found outside Alberto’s in Mountain View the other week ago.

• Camera has really bad delay: I keep taking pictures about 3 seconds after I hit the button. Hence I tend to take a lot of blurry photos that do not even show what I had hoped to take pictures of. I have to stop..... and then wait.... and then wait more.... and then click .... and then I wait... and then I wait... and then it shows me the photo. Then it immediately shoves the picture away so I have to leave the camera-view to go to a gallery of a sort to delete bad shots. Then back again to the camera. Innacurate? Tedious? Blurry? Meh.

So the iPhone sort of works. I got a call on it today. Yay? I also had to make calls on it outbound when my old Treo 650 was dying (more on that in another article).

I’ll stick to the Treo, thank you. I upgraded to the 755P, after a torture-of-the-damned voyage into Microsoft Mobile hell and back with an 800W (more about that also in another article).

Simply put, the iPhone is far from the whiz-bang I had hoped it to be. Since I’ve wasted so much time dinking around just trying to get it to work AT ALL, I still haven’t gotten to use Evernote yet.

On a scale of Suckfulness, where 0 is “It doesn’t suck at all,” and 10 is “Please, first let me put my own eyes out, and then suffer to die, to punish myself for buying this turd of a product,” the iPhone is about a 4. It is painful to use, but not sufficiently painful enough to return to the manufacturer.

But in a Joy-to-use scale, it is also only a 4. I have not felt compelled to carry it around. I often just let it drain its batteries and sit on the shelf. “Oh well.” It is as impressive to me as my first Apple QuickTake camera. i.e., not-so-bad, not-so-good.

Maybe if I could start using Evernote I’d care more about it. That means I actually have to get all my technology products to work in harmony, and not act as boat anchors and paperweights.

Thinking about one thing more: the lack-of-touch-screen is going to be problematic in extreme cold weather. You have to take off any gloves, since you have to use a fingertip and you can’t use a stylus. Since you’ll be colder, your hand will shake more and be less effective in accurately touching a keyboard character. I keep thinking about New York City this Christmas, and am not looking forward to it.

-Pete.