5 Things STILL Wrong With iPhone 3G
Posted July 15th, 2008 | 11 Comments
I love my iPhone 3G but it’s not perfect. A few of the problems with the original iPhone remain along with a big new one.
1. MobileMe sucks!
I’ve been a long time .mac subscriber so was naturally excited about the relaunch as MobileMe. Jobs really did a good job of selling it to me at the keynote. It appeared to be everything I needed to improve my Mac workflow!
Maybe it still will be someday, but it’s day 5 now and it’s still not even close. On launch day Friday the site was down all day.
Saturday it was back up but luckily for me I use Twitter and was put off by the constant tweets from people claiming to have lost Contacts whilst syncing.
Sunday it was down again.
Monday I finally got MobileMe working but then find out that it doesn’t actually “push” from Mac to cloud as promised, only from cloud to Mac and cloud to iPhone. If you make changes on a Mac they are not synced for 15 minutes which is exactly the same as it was with .mac and therefore no improvement at all. FAIL!
2. Still no MMS
I assumed when the original iPhone had no MMS that it would be saved as one of the reasons to upgrade to the next version.
iPhone 3G is here yet still no MMS! Why? It really is disappointing that such an expensive, high-tech device can’t so something that almost every other phone on the market can.
Yes I can email photos which is great but unfortunately most of the people I send pictures to don’t have email on their phones. FAIL!
3. Camera
It’s not quite as bad as people make out, the picture quality is actually surprisingly good for a 2MP camera but it is 2008 and I had a better camera on my Nokia phone in 2005 which also managed to record video too.
I’m sure it’s something that Apple could have looked at without adding too much extra cost or weight to the phone. FAIL!
4. Bluetooth
The iPhone 3G has bluetooth. Bluetooth ‘capabilities’ that is. Which means you can spend even more money on bluetooth headsets and other accessories.
But what if you want to quickly send somebody a file? Well you can’t, not via bluetooth anyway. I was genuinely shocked when I found this out, I actually thought there was something wrong with my iPhone at first.
All of my Macs have bluetooth sending capabilities and it would have been nice to be able to transfer files between them and my iPhone quickly. I’m also going to be the odd one out whilst the latest Britney Spears MPEG is being ‘bluetoothed’ around the pub by everybody with inferior phones. FAIL!
5. o2
UK only this one but probably applies to other countries too, I have heard similar complaints of AT&T in America.
The fact that Apple chose to go with just 1 carrier was a problem in itself, it removes any competitiveness from the network provider.
And o2 just aren’t that good, their 3G coverage, network speeds and customer service are all dramatically worse than my previous network provider who I was very happy with but forced to leave. FAIL!
AND….
Of course the list needed to be a Catchy Top 5 and not 7 or 8. Otherwise I would have mentioned the ability to Copy & Paste, support for additional storage and battery replacements.
In saying that, none of the above stopped me getting an iPhone 3G and they won’t stop me enjoying it, it’s still a fantastic phone but could be so much better.
I wonder how many of the above will still exist after the next iPhone launch?
Free iPhone 3g 4u
15.07.08
I agree with all of the above but I would add to Bluetooth that I bought Bluetooth wireless headphones and they wouldn’t work with my iPhone. I tried them with a bluetooth laptop and there were no problems, apparently there are two types of bluetooth and the iphone uses the less useful one - unsurprisingly!
Tijs
16.07.08
1) no experience with MobileMe yet, curious though I have to say.
2) you wrote ‘FAIL’ instead of ‘yet’… Leaving it out might be a way to force other manufacturers to support proper email functionality on their phones. I don’t know. Thing is, I never missed it. Whenever I received one, I got a text message telling me to go to a website to view it even though my phone was perfectly capable of showing it itself. Inferior technology and expensive too.
3) are you serious about this? you take photo’s with a CAMERA, not with an iPhone. Check out Flickr though and you see that there wasn’t really any need to upgrade it as it takes pretty decent pictures for a phone.
4) I have no real opinion on this, my old Treo failed to save and open files via Bluetooth when it didn’t know how to open them. I’d have to wait till the file was received and then got a message it didn’t know how to open it and the file was simply discarded. Also it was slooooooow… Come to think of it, emailing it would probably be faster.
5) Don’t know O2 as I live in the Netherlands and we have to put up with T-Mobile (you won’t believe how clueless the act when it comes to the iPhone… underestimation of the year). On the other hand it’s not weird for a manufacturer to go with just 1 provider. It might be because AT&T had a bad name that it was hung out so broadly but it’s nothing special. T-Mobile have done it for years with MDAs before HTC decided to release phones under the HTC brandname.
Shaun
16.07.08
Tijs: Interesting to hear your opinions, although I have to disagree with most of them. It just goes to show Apple (or anybody) can’t please everybody all the time.
Regarding the camera, yes I do take photos with my phone. I use an expensive and large Canon DSLR camera for serious shots but that is far too big to carry around all the time and I wouldn’t want to either. There are loads of times I want to take photos and don’t have a camera. Almost every decent phone out there has a better camera than the iPhone which is a shame.
Emailing is not faster than bluetooth transfer, it’s a slower speed and also a longer process. The main problem that I stated though is that most people I would be sending files to don’t have email. Again almost every phone has bluetooth so I can’t understand why Apple don’t allow us to use it.
And in the UK at least, the iPhone is the ONLY major phone (afaik) that is network restrictive, so it is a bit weird.
Thanks for your comments though, it’s always good to hear different opinions!
Spoo
18.07.08
I totally agree with the comment on the MMS and the copy and paste features. Its just lame… not to mention that the Safari on here is even buggier than the one on the previous iPhone. I like it and all, but after experiencing these things I’m tempted to eBay it and make a few hundred bucks!
JET
20.07.08
Yeah, for all its loveliness, it does have some quite major blemishes. For me the major one is being saddled to iTunes, which is far and away the worst MP3 playing/handling/managing program in popular use today. And being all bilingual; the lack of a proper Swedish keyboard. Come on, it’s three more characters - at least give me double taps on e for ä, a for å and o for ö. It shouldn’t be that difficult.
AG
24.07.08
Totally agree on all these. I love my iPhone but some things are really backwards. I’m not on 3G yet so not sure if these have been improved yet but I would also add the SMS functionality is pretty poor - you can’t save drafts, pick out phone numbers from SMS messages, forward text messages, edit / resend sent text messages, forward details from the contacts folder.
Oli from the-iBlog
28.07.08
I’m using O2 for the first time now, so far so good. I’ve discovered an area in Doncaster that O2 reckon is full 3G coverage, and I don’t even get EDGE though. Apart from that…..
Shaun
28.07.08
Spoo: I feel your pain! There’s no way I’m eBaying mine but I am hoping for a few updates to fix some of the early problems.
Jet: I don’t actually mind iTunes personally, after using the software that comes with Creative MP3 players iTunes is a big improvement. That said, I agree that we shouldn’t HAVE to use iTunes. Would be nice to have the choice!
AG: Thanks for the comment, all good points which I probably should have added at the end of my post as ‘extras’.
iBlog: To be fair to o2, I don’t have anything bad to say about them after 3 weeks use. My problem was mainly with Apple for forcing me to move to o2. I was happy with my previous network and had to pay a lot of money to get out of it early.
DP
06.08.08
I’m guessing that a lot of the “crippling” has to do with good business for Apple - better put: increasing their cash flow and being a good, corporate player.
Cashflow? If Apple disables bluetooth file transferring but makes MobileMe available, maybe people will buy the service because they want the functionality. If people buy the service, why would Apple want to make available a competitive solution such as BT file transfer.
A good, corporate player? When it comes to sharing files via bluetooth with friends, I’m sure Apple, at some level, wants to make all of the other corporations out there with stolen intellectual property (i.e. movies, music, etc.) at least feel like Apple won’t add to the theft. But I hardly doubt this has a bearing on Apple’s decision to disable bluetooth file transfer functionality - I’m thinking their own bottom line and profitability (MobileMe) was the biggest factor.
It will be interesting to see if MobileMe will last or if a horde of angry customers who want full capabilities on their iphones will be able to convince Apple to stop playing the technological gatekeeper. Then again, maybe a hacking keymaster may come along…
JET
07.08.08
Just one problem with the reasoning for locking down bluetooth; sharing files with your *actual* friends is neither illegal nor stealing.
fornetti
31.08.08
I do not believe this
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