Scribblings

First, the build quality and looks are amazing (even though you cannot remove the battery), also I like how the cam looks subtle (though I don’t care much about the cam), the speaker is well placed and the UI was spot on.

But then I connected it to my laptop. Now, with all my other phones; I just play a few days around with some custom ROMs then install all my favorite applications, sync my contacts and calendar with outlook and swap the memory card and that would be it. But now I need to install iTunes (there is no other way), I’ll tell you why this is a big deal, I already have napster membership and that pretty much takes care of my music library. Ok! I give in, downloaded the iTunes. The phone connects like a charm. Take me about 30 mins to setup my music but contacts/mail/calender syncs like a charm from outlook. Then I make some wallpaper (the iPhone has got an amazing screen); then uploaded it to the phone (again I have to use the iTunes). Now I want some cool ring tones, I have a huge library of this; so I choose a few. Now what do I do? I don’t want it to be mixed with my music or show up in my ‘iPod’. Go to google and find out I need to convert it to acc and then rename it to .m4r. Done all that and my phone is good to go.

Now here is the huge huge problem. The iTunes lets me sync music/pictures/ringtone (pretty much everything except mail/contacts/calendar) with just one machine. This is a huge problem because I have 3 laptops and I just can’t download a song in one machine and add it to the phone. Please enlighten me, how is this even remotely existing in this time and age? I’ll give u an example; you have a desktop you pretty much use at home for all the media. You keep your phone synced with this. Now you are out on a vacation and you hear a cool song, you download it to your laptop. But for sure you can’t listen to it on your ‘iPod’ phone. If you want to play it then you loose your entire library. Maybe this is not a common problem but then I can come up with millions of examples. It’s the same for wallpaper and ringtone. The worst part is you can’t sync your ring tone without affecting you music library. Forgive me but this is a bigger problem than the ‘cut and paste’ debacle. No flash for the camera, o phalease.

Next, I use gmail as my main email but I also forward all my other mails to gmail and set it up to send mails or reply back from different email ids. The problem with that setup in an iPhone is; for one there is no ‘push’ service for gmail and two, I can’t configure different ‘From’ address for one email account. Generally I won’t be mad with this because not a lot of software for PC or WM6 allows me to do it, in fact the only software which supports it is thunderbird for PC. I’m mad because there is a way you can do it on the iPhone but only if I sync the mail settings from a Mac. As for the MobileMe feature by Apple, open it in IE7 (don’t ask me why but I use IE), it throws an error saying IE7 is not fully supported, that’s a good one. Why, do I suddenly get a ‘Microsoftish’ feeling about this?

So it looks like Apple wants me to drop every other service provider and start using them for all my needs. Buy a mac, use iTunes for music, safari for browsing, me.com for mail, MobileMe for photos, storage and everything else. Actually these are all good service maybe even the best but I certainly don’t want to be told what I have to use. I have a Sony Vaio, I use gamil, flikr and napster. That’s because I love these and I’m in no hurry to jump ship. As for the iPhone, I’ll keep it, it has 3G and I’ll find a way around everything else.

The bottom line here is that even though the iPhone is smartly made, its way short on the ‘smart phone’ meter.