My very own iPhone rant...
 

I've said it over and over... I'm not an Apple fanboy, the "cult of Mac" offends me something fierce... and up until the 3.x OS, I was relatively happy with my iPhone 3G.

3.0 introduced an odd behavior that would sometimes show up but was rather easy to circumvent. Sometimes the 3rd party programs would suddenly close upon opening them. All you would have to do is install a new app - a free app would do - then all of your past apps would work just fine.

But it annoys the living hell out of me.

3.1 didn't fix that. In fact, it made it worse. On some days the boot up will stick for 15+ minutes. And this is a recently replaced iPhone 3G. I had a 3GS for a day, but took it back because of some seriously bad dead pixels - which... well, it happens. They replaced my original iPhone 3G by mistake with a 3GS, noticed the mistake and the dead pixels and gave me back an iPhone 3G. No big deal, I'm not too concerned with a damn compass...

Back to my rant. So today, I had a phone that all of a sudden received text messages and voice mail from two days ago and going forward. I called AT&T and they couldn't locate any outages or anything. I called Apple and they asked me to restart the phone "just in case"... 15 minutes later, the phone hadn't even restarted.

They offered to send me yet another iPhone... but I have to pay some $30 bucks in order to secure a phone since I'm not really near an Apple Store. Yeah... right.

But seriously... I know I've ranted about missing dependencies/application catalogs before on the N810 and the iPhone just "works"... but since 2.2.1, the iPhone platform isn't "just working". And I'm not alone.

There's tons of people that are having similar problems. Nokia, make things work well. Not "just work"... but work damn well and you'll get the people that are upset about stuff like this.

Ugh. Sorry... I had to get that off my chest.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

And here I was thinking on getting a iPod Touch 3G myself.... now that the 8 gig model is $199, has the Cortex and I guess the multitasking will come eventually (an iPhone OS dev mentioned that lack of multitasking in the iPhone was due to low RAM, but now the N900 must have given them a clue about swap).

But right now my main phone is an E71... though little s.o.b., never gives up, never hangs up. Not gonna replace it unless I know the replacement is rock solid.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

Hey, I was thinking to get an iPhone with all the hype and all the people around using iPhones... is iPhone that bad?

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

@gerbick: sorry to hear about the bs you've had to gone through, but i think you should've kept the 3gs since it should've addressed your app-exitiing concern. Afaik it's caused by not enough memory and the 3gs would've addressed that handily (40ish mb free ram vs 140ish mb free ram after boot). Also the cortex a8 cpu is at least around 2x faster on most tasks..

@mrojas: the cpu upgrade is only on 32gb and 64gb model. The 8gb model afaik still use the touch 2G cpu (which is faster than iphone 3g but slower than 3gs).

@architengi: depends on what you plan to use it for, best case scenario (for the iphone) is of course if you want to live within apple's walled garden. in that circumstances the iphone would perform without much technical bugs and as designed. once it's jailbroken and we try to run (unauthorized) 3rd party apps, then there's higher chance of depriving the limited resources (the 3gs is still ok in this regards though, with double the ram).

My biggest gripes against the iphone: no multitasking, no direct data sharing between apps (sandboxed security), no hardware keyboard, constant fight w/ apple for 'freedom'.

What I like about it: it's simple, it's an appliance. For single task-specific purposes (ebook reading, games, email, browsing), things just work and they work rather well for a handheld device.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

Welcome to one of the many reasons I am a reformed Mac fanboy. I can't tell you how many of my friends on Twitter are complaining about the same issue right now.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

And which one is that issue they complain about?

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

@architengi: reply added to previous post.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

Apps dying left and right to the point that they have to reboot the phone several times a day.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

@zerojay: are they using OS3.1? I haven't heard of such massive problem on OS3.0.x, unless it's due to someone running too much 3rd party background apps.

I heard the OS3.1 is still quite buggy and if they're running it now then that means they're not jailbreaking their iphones, because the proper tools haven't been released yet.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

I've lived with it. It's easy to get around; however I feel as if it is a pain in the butt. And today, I was in the mountains, traveling and things just went south... in a very bad way.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

Yes, he's on OS3.1 on his iPhone and he's getting really pissed. Seems he can barely even keep his phone on at all anymore.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

Thanks for this thread gerbick...

...before the thread is taken over by helpful folks who might imply that your problems are because of operator error, I want to reemphasize your original point that the iPhone doesn't always "just work".

:)

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

Someone on Twitter just mentioned that an update was just released, 3.1.1. Perhaps it will help you.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

I wish it were just user error. In fact, I'm even willing to admit when it is user error.

But a blank phone, that got upgraded to 3.0 from 2.2.1 and had no phone numbers/contacts, apps or anything on it was what happened initially. They replaced that 3G with an 3GS by mistake. I felt like the honorable thing was to replace the 3GS with my original purchased (platform-wise at least) 3G and not try to "get over"... and that phone came with 3.0 on it.

Updated to 3.1 and... return of the sluggishness et al. And not, 15 minute reboots - if an app gets cranky or something - and today... a flood of messages that came from nowhere. Apparently, I missed even more in the last day (Saturday) and early Saturday, I got my Thursday night/Friday (whole day) messages and voice mails.

I've wiped it clean, forced a reinstall of the 3.1 from scratch and my boots are now under 1 minute. I've hand re-installed each of the apps, turned off, then turned back on to see if any of them were the culprit.

So far, so good. But I've been at it for over 2 hours.

Another friend of mine, he's been stuck with a 1604 error since Wednesday. He's on a PC, I'm on a Mac. He's not a heavy user, I am. He's not upgraded since 2.2.1 and I had upgraded twice on my original phone, once on this replacement, and the 3GS already had 3.0.1 but I gave it back because I wanted to be honest.

My app list is anemic. Barely two pages. And no mods. Nothing odd. Hell, I'm not even using Push. Manual e-mail retrieval...

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

3.1 is what showing up for me as the last update, no 3.1.1.

http://gerbick.com/images/screenie.jpg

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

@zerojay: thanks for the headsup, but I think 3.1.1 might be referring to ipod touch's firmware.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

The rumor is Apple is doing their best to force everyone to upgrade to 3.1.1. My iPod touch got hosed on Thursday for some reason and I had to do a low level refresh: Turn off, plug in, hold down power key, wait, hold down home key, wait till screen goes blank, release power key, wait till iTunes gives me a refresh dialog box. I clicked okay and then iTunes downloaded and restored me to 3.1.1. Everything's fine now, but it wasn't a cool experience.

Re: My very own iPhone rant...
 

Hopefully that rumor isn't true. If it's one thing I've learned from both the hardware and software side of computing. Never upgrade until all the issues are ironed out. No matter how good the features look. Hope things turn out better gerbick.