Bagel Belly Blog

iPhone update

So, it's been a week of living with the iPhone, how's it going?

Mostly, pretty good. I'm still in awe of the fact that a mobile phone has some basic usability added to it, and that to do anything I don't have to navigate through many different folders or remember which obscure softkey you configured as you do in Symbian world. Mobile Safari and the iPhone version of NetNewsWire are getting the most screen time, and it's a pleasure to be connected to my favourite time-wasting solutions anywhere and anywhen.

Email-on-the-move basically means delete-spam-on-the-move, and I think I'd rather have a rich client GMail app than use Apple's Mail, since the "search don't file" meme of GMail has infected me. I find myself pointing Safari at GMail almost as often as using the inbuilt Mail, usually when I know there's a specific email I want (e.g. the one containing my train ticket reservation number).

The AppStore is both awesome and terrible, in equal parts. For ease of use and simplicity to grab cool apps and spend money, it wins triple bonus points. For frustration, take all those points away. The closed system is a real problem for users and app developers: for example, I've been using NetNewsWire 1.0 for a week, waiting desperately for the new release (it's now up to 1.0.7), but yesterday evening the only update Apple would give me was to 1.0.1. Update: Turns out this is actually 1.0.7 even though the version number is 1.0.1.

I can kinda understand the rationale behind the App Store - not every developer could scale out their infrastructure to provide seamless downloads for the millions upon millions of iPhone users out there, so it's a benefit along the lines of Apple's podcast downloads. But implicit in providing a service like that is the need to make it quick, efficient, and to focus on removing the pain points, like speed of listing new and updated apps. Apple must work harder here.

Then there's some other bad stuff:

I've renamed my iPhone 'crashPhone'. Since owning it, I've seen reboots every other day. That's worse than the Nokia N95 I'd been using! (Which crashed once every other week.)

Doing an update of a bunch of apps via the AppStore on the phone caused it to rearrange them on screen, losing all my careful positioning. Not only that, but the update seems to trash the previous version of the app, including application data, so I've lost things like user preferences.

If you remember the key selling point for me was integration with the desktop and no more badly-mangled calendars, you'll be greatly amused by the screenshot, which shows the many duplicated events that are now showing up in iCal. I now have the fun task of clearing all this up. Just what I wanted to avoid.

Sync-n-Crash: this new service from Apple displays an error every time you sync your iPhone. After the first few times clicking "Report", I gave up on the assumption that we'll see an update to iTunes/iPhone when Apple is ready, and not when we're sick of seeing errors.

My migration to o2 was not without fault (no-one could ring me for several hours, voicemails left on o2 in that time were lost). Carphone Warehouse are also doing their best to piss me off, with no less than five calls so far trying to pressure me into taking out insurance, despite refusing it on the day I bought the phone and subsequently telling them to remove me from their call list. But these are faults with the UK retailers, and not the phone itself.

Other than the few gripes above, and despite the feature downgrades (no MMS, no camera flash, no video, low megapixel camera), the phone is still a quantum leap over my previous phone. I wouldn't go back.

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