So, as elluded to in my previous post I bought an iphone. The 8GB models were being sold off cheap with £100 off the price and it seemed like the ideal time to road test a new phone as my p910 is very tired.

We spent a beautiful day in love, we were really into each other. I couldn't keep my hands off her.  Then the strain started to show.
 

There *are* some touches of pure genius.

+The call management facilities are a benchmark for all future phones. Conferencing, privacy and audio device selection are all seamlessly usable with no training or prior knowledge.
+A real switch for locking the phone. A real rocker switch for flipping between silent and noisy mode (which vibrates briefly when you are entering silent mode so you don't have to take the phone out of your pocket).

+Email on the go was great, a good email interface allowed me to cut a swathe through all the day to day operational noise that is in my mailbox. That worked great via GPRS/EDGE/WIFI.

(At first it did not like my home WIFI {connections hanging after a few minutes of successful browsing} then I diddled about with the basic rate advertisement from the old base station and it was happy.)

-Battery life is appalling. I ended up tethered to my desk (which prevented my usual pacing around whilst on conference calls). If you update facebook and check your email a few times and use a bluetooth headset to make calls then you are out of luck, it's a brick by mid-morning. Seriously I was never without my charging cable. The biggest culprit by far was the bluetooth. Turn that off and I could get through a working day. But add a call in the car to my mum via bluetooth and I would still need to charge it before the evening was out.

-GSM Reception is worse than my previous phone. It seems fine when the phone is on the desk but it varies dramatically when on the move. It swings wildly from 100% down to 20% and gives "no network" at multiple points in all my previously 100% call friendly car routes. That resulted in a lot of dropped calls.

Aside from the mood swings, she never really gelled with my friends. Even went out of her way to keep us from getting in touch.

-I had to text my number to someone and the *only* way to do this is to type your number into an SMS! No vcard support? No "send contact via..."  No cut and paste even! aaargh!   Why!

- Safari does not cope well with low-bandwidth links. Opera really does win hands down under these conditions. If you are looking something up in the pub to settle an argument you will not win with Safari unless the pub has WIFI

I spoke to a few of her ex's and we compared notes, they had the same experiences. I could see that they were pleased to finally have someone to talk to about it.

You know that cool iphone mechanic where you pull your fingers apart on the screen in order to pull an image closer? In the end that became analagous to my ongoing  experience, feeling like I was pulling myself farther and farther into a dense unfamiliar jungle.

Two-fold failure to integrate.

-The phone speaks to my oft-repaired ibook just fine. This is just as well because  it won't speak to my Windows XP 64 iTunes (where the majority of my music is). I take the hit on that no-one said iTunes would be supported on XP64.

-Amazingly I can't use it as a bluetooth modem. (see here)

-It will not connect to my Apple bluetooth keyboard (which works great with my Sony PS3!). What on earth?  It turns out there is no bluetooh HID profile (among other missing profiles)... not out of line with my human interface experience (read on).

-Hmm but I said "two-fold", the second integration problem is more subjective. It failed to become a part of me. My aging brain refuses to acknowledge that I could not press the home button (the only button on the face of the phone that you can feel) in order to hang up without looking. Instead you have to look at the phone and target the big red "end call" virtual button on the touch screen. Or if you have already pressed the home button, then you first have to find the green "return to call" button at the top of the screen, press it, wait, press the big red button at the bottom of the screen, then you can lock and put the phone away.  That bit was easier with the bluetooth headset (but for the battery life). Perhaps this is due to my HCI expectations being built up whilst experiencing other phone technology and this one is just too different for the time being? I remain to be convinced, the *basics* (answer and hang up) of using a phone should not be like reading a diagram.

The last straw...
 
The romance was over when I was staying at a friends house and the following happened: I was going to sleep and I thought "hey better charge the battery so that I can do some work with that pesky phone tomorrow. Hmm, my laptop has 45 minutes of charge left. That will give me enough of a boost to at least get through the traffic and to  reach my desk in order to finish the charge. I'll put the lappy 486 into low power mode and kill the LCD *and* I'll turn off the phone so that it gets maximum benefit from the power source. Also it means that I don't waste my mate's electricity or have to put up with the angelic whine of the laptop all night."

-I woke up in the morning to find a flat laptop as expected but the iPhone boosted?  Nope it does not charge it you turn it off. OMG

That was it... I sadly took the SIM card out and picked up my old Sony Ericsson (which I appreciate much more now BTW). I await the next offering with a much clearer understanding of what I demand from a phone. My fear is that the team that put this thing together had a grand beautiful vision which has been sliced and diced for revenue generation/vendor-exclusivity and time to market reasons. That would be horribly cruel. This could be so good.

I felt bad for a while. I mean she was so beautiful...

...but impossible to live with.