Why the iPhone sucks
Idyllic retreat, or boredom incarnate? Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.
You would easily be forgiven for thinking the iPhone was a paragon of technical perfection, the answer to all of our prayers and so forth. Certainly I would warrant that a quick Internet trawl would throw up many articles praising the iPhone as Steve Jobs’ Second Coming, and more or less establishing it as the de-facto web 2.0 geek’s mobile phone of choice. But in amongst such positivity, how do we find the negative? You guessed it, that’s one of the problems I’m trying to solve.
Sometimes it’s as easy as adding the word ’sucks’ to your Googling. And yet an article like this MobileCrunch rundown of ‘8 things that we still can’t stand about the iPhone‘ is full of negative language without using too many explicitly laden adjectives, while also being very specific, constructive and useful. The comments thread is a goldmine for anyone looking to make a better iPhone, so it’s not just Apple that should be paying attention, but its competitors too.
My point here is that although things seem black-and-white when you’re trying to pull out the negativity surrounding a product, often really valuable content can be hard to find manually, whereas a sophisticated natural-language algorithm that weighted several factors would identify the above article as being fairly key to the negative sentiment around the iPhone yesterday and today. Such as, I don’t know, the one I’m developing.
As a side note, most of the poster’s concerns about the iPhone are pretty valid, and as commenters immediately identify, lack of copy and paste is a big problem too. To be frank, though, only two of the problems really affect me – no SMS counter, and no email search. Due to being Twitter-trained, 160 character messages are a luxury, and Gmail offers a web interface for when I need to search — sometimes we train ourselves to work around the device’s faults, rather than expecting the device to work for us.
Interesting thread, congratulations should be made on the opening gambit!
On my second iPhone now and you might say a mac addict, there are many reasons why, perhaps the central one being simplicity, especially in terms of integration and software updates, look and feel. Microsoft doesn’t cut it imo.
Couldn’t let you get away with a complete denouncing of the iPhone, because one thing it has done is enable thousands of applications to be developed in a matter of months, yes there is no denying that not all applications are perfect, or even useful and there are many clones out there, but in most instances use and function are well above average for a mobile device. You CAN cut and paste on the iPhone, there is a web app called PASTEBUD that actively demonstrates this, it has an SMS counter that shows how many SMS you have in your inbox and, because of the threading style makes use even more personal, which leaves your final moan being no email search, well true you can’t search through emails, but why would you want to on a mobile device? I certainly prefer to use a computer for that activity and generally would only want to retrieve recent emails from any one of the accounts I hold. On this basis, I can’t quite see your argument, and would say that despite some relatively minor issues, the iPhone has and remains one of the most revolutionary products on the mobile market, leaving clunky poorly designed clones in its wake (I have had a number of HTC products over the years and my experience of them as with Microsoft is poor build quality and bad OS execution, Vista has to be one of the worst OS launches of recent times, and quite frankly a rip off to customers, at least with Apple you know what you are paying for), or perhaps as with all negative comments, there is a part of them which is envy….