The iPhone Sucks

I got an iPhone on December 2, and all I can say is that I’m glad that AT&T has a 30 day return policy. My biggest complaints to date:

1. No “cut and paste” — still — and people have been complaining about that since the first iPhone came out. What good is it to have web access and email, but no cut and paste?
2. The “virtual keyboard” is nifty, but completely impractical and makes my hand feel like it has turned into a claw after using it for more than 15 minutes.
3. I’m not sure what would last longer, an erection in the presence of Katherine Harris or the iPhone’s battery.
4. And even though the battery life sucks, you can’t just carry a spare battery with you, as the battery is not user-replaceable.
5. The camera utterly sucks. Don’t get me wrong, I realize that a phone isn’t a camera, and my last blackberry didn’t even have a camera (and I bought it for that reason). But, if you’re going to bother to put a camera in a media device, don’t make it suck ass.
6. Speaking of pictures, you can attach ONE picture to each email. Sending an email on this thing is a big enough pain in the ass. Doing it repetitively to send additional files is just painful.
7. No MMS. If someone sends me a picture message, I’ve got to log on to the internet and enter in a picture ID and a password, both of which are generated by the system, both of which are incredibly hard to remember. If I could CUT AND PASTE, it might be okay, but this way I either have to grow a photographic memory or whip out a pencil to write down the codes.
8. You can’t forward a text message
9. Apple touts it as having the “real internet” on it. I have news for Apple, the real internet uses FLASH — a lot. If I can’t see websites that use Flash, I can’t view exotic websites like the BOSTON GLOBE
10. Every goddamn time I want to charge the phone by plugging it into my USB jack, stupid iTunes launches.
11. Speaking of iTunes, that is the only way you can get files on or off the iPhone. Even my $19 MP3 player can work as an external hard drive. Apple disabled that function on the iPhone. (Yes, there are third-party workarounds, but why make something so simple like “drag and drop files” into a pain in the ass?
12. It has a GPS, but no turn-by-turn directions like my $50 Garmin that runs on AA batteries. So, if you’re driving, you HAVE to look at the phone’s screen to navigate. It might be great if you’re walking around Noe Valley, but most of us use GPS in the damn car.
13. No tethering to your laptop.
14. No removable storage. It has a slot for a SIM card, but Apple figured we wouldn’t want removable storage.
15. The iPhone is a Piece of Shit, and So is Your Face (Okay, I didn’t make that one up)
16. Applications like mail and the browser crash CONSTANTLY. Way to give us the Windows Vista experience, Apple!

I really really tried to like this thing. I kept making excuses for it. Despite my lengthy list of reasons to hate it, I figured I might just keep it. My cell phones rarely last a year anyhow, and I did like the fact that it automatically synchronized contacts and calendar entries with my Macintosh. Even better, it would auto-synch with my iPod touch that I leave at home.

But, if I’m on the fence about a product, the most sure-fire way to piss me off and have me running for the return aisle is to let me find out that Apple is censoring content from the app store based on automatic scans for “dirty words.” If an e-book has the word “fuck” in it, you can’t read it on your iPhone. To be honest, I don’t think I would ever read a book on an iPhone anyway, and I’m as big a Mac cheerleader/fanboy as you’ll find, but fuck Cupertino if it thinks that I’m going to support it on a product that has an electronic Anthony Comstock inside it.

My next text message will be sent from a new Blackberry Bold.