Why my iPhone 3G Experience has been iFAIL

August 27th, 2008, 19:00 Posted By: wraggster

It has been a month since the iPhone 3G hit stores worldwide to an eagerly awaiting crowd. It was the second coming of the Jesus-Phone and this one was going to be the phone we deserved the first time round. New Firmware, GPS, the App Store and of course the 3G support all built into a more curvaceous body.

Things didn’t get off to a perfect start on launch day with O2s systems going down in the UK and Apple having problems with iTunes activation and the freshly launched Mobile Me. But despite these issues Apple still managed to sell over a million iPhone 3Gs in its first weekend of release.

So how does the Jesus-Phone 2.0 shape up?

The Hardware

The original iPhone was extremely well built with a metal back-plate and a solid glass front and the iPhone 3G maintains that pedigree. The metal back-plate has been replaced by a more curvy plastic one but the device still feels reassuringly heavy, solid and is more pocketable.

Sadly that is where the praise ends because the iPhone 3G has to have some of the worst Hardware I’ve ever used in a high-end phone. It fails at even the most basic tasks and a lot of the features didn’t seem to work at all.

Let me start with the most basic of features: Making voice calls. The iPhone 3G (I shall refer to it as the iFail for the remainder of this post) would regularly refuse to initiate a phone call sometimes requiring me to try 7-8 times before it decided it would let me call someone. That is something I’ve never experienced even in the early days when I had my first mobile phone.

Of course I would only be able to try and make that call if I was actually lucky enough to be in an area where I could pick up reception. The iFail seems to maintain an average reception level of 2 bars and will also drop service all together at random intervals. 3G reception is just as dodgy.

And before you even mention O2, I always carry 2 phones with me, both on the O2 network. Whenever I’ve had these problems on the iFail the other phone (usually a Nokia) has worked perfectly and has maintained full reception in most cases. Can’t blame O2 at all, it’s all down to the iFail hardware.

And reception isn’t the only hardware issue, GPS is just as problematic. The first iFail I used flat-out refused to connect to GPS at all even when out in the open on a perfect clear day. The device even failed to give me a rough location based on Cell-ID or WiFi hotspots, something that the built in Skyhook software should be able to do. The second iFail proved to be a bit better and would actually lock onto a GPS location, however it seemed to have a mind of its own and would only connect when it felt like it. Admittedly when GPS worked it was great but it’s lack of reliability meant that I couldn’t trust that it would work when I needed it to.

However both these problems are trumped by the iFails worst feature: Battery Life. The iFail has the worst battery life of any device I’ve ever used, including the first-generation N95. Sure it will last all day if you turn 3G and WiFi off and don’t check your email too often but I’m a person who actually uses his phone.

Let me try and put this into perspective: After 2.5 hours of using the iFail as I would any other phone I had 20% battery left from a full charge. What was I doing? Checking email, taking pictures and uploading them to Moblog, making a phone call or two and using the browser to check and update Twitter. I wasn’t even listening to music while doing all that. So even if the iFail had no faults and had the most compelling features in the mobile world, I wouldn’t be able to use them as I’d run out of charge before my day had even begun.

Software

When it came to Software I wasn’t expecting any problems. Apples UI is fantastic and intuitive and had just been updated. Unfortunately the new updates seem to have slowed down the UI and OS. Applications (both native and installed) freeze when being opened, Safari stutters when you scroll round a page and I’ve experienced my first crashes on an iPhone. In a word, it’s Buggy.

More annoying than these minor speed issues are the limitations the device has when compared to other phones on the market. We all know that the iPhone can’t send MMS and can’t record video, which is a bad start. There really is no excuse for these basic features to be missing and I’d assume these would be more important to the average user than GPS or even HSDPA.

However power-users who are used to having smartphones will notice more limitations like the absence of an option to copy/paste text and, crucially, the inability to run non-native apps in the background. Before you start shouting, yes I get that most users wouldn’t miss either of those features but in my opinion it’s features like this that are crucial to making a phone a truly multi-purpose device.

The lack of background apps is particularly annoying, something I’ve become used to after years of S60 (and even WinMo) use. The last.fm application is useless to me as I can’t play the music in the background while doing other things. Shozu is also effected because I have to leave it open while it uploads a photo and if I exit it by mistake the data sent will be posted as half an image.

Apple tell us that this limitation is to preserve the battery life, and I can believe them given how anemic the iFails battery is. There are promises that some Apps will eventually be allowed to run in the background so we’ll have to see what future software updates bring.

However it isn’t all doom-and-gloom in terms of Software. The addition of the App Store to the iPhone/iPod Touch platform is a real triumph. Never has it been so easy to browse, download and install apps from on the device itself. Nokias Download! app pales in comparison and makes you wonder why Nokia haven’t ever had something as compelling as the App Store on their S60 phones.

It certainly helps that the App Store is already full of various applications a good proportion of which are free to download. My only issue is that some larger applications (over 10Mb) can’t be downloaded over 3G and require a WiFi connection if you want to download it on the device. This is the same limitation that makes the iTunes app totally useless to me, an artificial limitation being imposed by Apple this time on a data tariff that is supposed to allow unlimited use.

My final Software issue is to do with Geo-Tagging. The thing that really made the iPhone 3g appealing was that it would have GPS which would let me dive into the world of LBS. I was especially looking forward to Geo-Tagging my images and mapping various journeys and events using Moblogs new LBS features. However after finally getting GPS working on my iFail I noticed that none of the images I’d been uploading had any location information attached to them.

It turned out that the iFail can Geo-Tag images but the location information isn’t available to non-native apps. This mean when I use Shozu to upload my photos Apple doesn’t send through the location information that is attached to that image. Another needless limitation that defies common sense.

The iFail Experience

Having used the original iPhone and the iPod Touch I really had high expectations for the iPhone 3G. I knew it would have limitations because Apple like to keep tight control of the user experience but I wasn’t prepared for the experience to be quite this bad.

The thing is with some minor tweaks Apple could make the iPhone platform far more compelling. However that would mean loosening their grip on the overall user experience and that’s something we know they aren’t willing to do.

But I’m really just playing devils advocate with this “review”. Some of the issues I’ve talked about wouldn’t affect a casual user and the basic iPhone user experience is still very, very good. The iPhone 3G is a great device, I just think it could have been so much more. Hopefully the next version will live up to my high expectations and really shake up the industry the way the original iPhone did. For now we have a mediocre upgrade to a great device which will still win a lot of hearts and minds for Apple.

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