At the end of the day iPhone is no phone

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 03 July 2007 16:59

Business IT - Technology

According to a number of reports, the iPhone provides both poor voice quality reception and transmission. To compound matters, there are now multiple reports that attest to the weakness of the sound on the speaker phone and strength of the vibrator mode. Add to that, exceptionally poor reception in weak signal areas compared to other phones and the problems start to mount.

If we move on to messaging, which is fast becoming an expected feature of even cheap mobile phones, what has been touted as one of iPhone's strengths is in danger of being exposed as a glaring weakness. The touch screen keyboard may work well as a numeric keypad for dialling numbers but on a 3.5 inch screen in portrait mode it is causing angst as a QWERTY keyboard.

The SMS message interface is said to be joy because of the snazzy balloon format of messages that appear on the iPhone screen. However, inputing SMS messages is said to be a problem because a portrait mode QWERTY keyboard has impossibly small keys. The predictive typing software of iPhone may well correct many of your input errors. However, as anyone who has used such software before will attest, nothing beats having the ability to type things correctly in the first place.

SMS aside, sooner or later SMS is going to be obsolete because before too long we're all going to be chatting via instant messaging on our mobile devices. There are already a number of mobile phones from the major manufacturers such as Motorola and Nokia that enable IM. Sadly iPhone is not even a player in this space - yet.

One could forgive Apple for all these deficiencies and others mentioned in the steadily growing number of critiques because the iPhone is after all supposed to be a fun device. However, if it's so much fun, where are the games, where is the choice of ringtones and where is the inexhaustible library of widgets? 
And therein lays the problem. Apple in its paranoic need to maintain complete control of all aspects of its hardware will not allow third party developers access to its system – except through Safari, a limiting platform which most don’t want to develop for.

Thus, we see the birth of the iPhone in many ways mirroring the birth of the Mac. It's an expensive product that is very good at what it does. It will no doubt attract a limited elite audience very much like the Mac faithful who look down on the rest of us with a sort of smug disdain. They'll smirk as we navigate with difficulty through our mobile systems with thousands of cheap downloadable systems, while they pretend that life is so much better with limited choice at a premium price with a single vendor solution. Good luck to them. Me - I just want a good mobile phone.