iPhone 2.0 is a Bust ☀
iPhone 2.0: The glory wore off in wash
With the iPhone 2.0 launch, not so much. I’ve been using the phone every day for about a week now and it just isn’t up to the great expectations set by the first version. Everything feels so incredibly fragile.
Delays, instability, crashes, apps that hang, frozen screens, frequent restarts, inability to change layout from portrait to landscape, etc.…
Now I didn’t upgrade and pony up for a new phone, just the firmware in my 1G iPhone was upgraded to 2.0. The cost of a new phone, and an increase monthly service contract fees, I deemed exhorbitant.
The biggest plus to 2.0 was the AppStore and applications. But sadly, most of the applications I’ve tried out are rather unspectacular. The only two that I’ve liked are Marco’s Instapaper and Pandora. Instapaper is awesome, finally giving me an offline reading feature on my groovy iPhone in 2008 that I enjoyed back in 1998 with a Handspring PDA. And Pandora, is just pure sweetness, providing an infinite radio stream out of your pocket. All the rest of the applications are nothing but glorified web front-ends, offering miniscule improvements over the built-in Safari browser.
Missing in action, still:
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Copy and Paste. Good Gates, the old school Palm PDA (and the UI concerns are similar — just a finger tip instead of a stylus tip, and iPhone would have to implement would be a few gesture commands) had this function 10+ years ago, and even terminal programs on 40+ year old antiquated mainframe operating systems provided copy and paste.
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No eBook Reader. Unless there is a nifty application in the AppStore that I haven’t stumbled across yet. The ones I’ve seen thus far (including those you have to pay for), are inferior to again, what I had on my Handspring PDA back in 1998. I’d be happy with just being able to drag files into a /Documents folder on the device.
- Remote Sync. Why can’t I access my desktop (or laptop) machine from the iPhone? Why can’t I sync up podcasts from the device without docking into iTunes?
iPhones have been in short supply, dating back months even before the 2.0 launch. What happens if my phone malfunctions and I need a new one? Am I going to have to pay on a contract I can’t use because there isn’t a replacement phone available?
Whatever the faults are, the iPhone is still a mobile device that sucks a lot less than the rest of the field, at least here in the U.S..
