Originally Posted by MIKE WENDLAND

MIKE WENDLAND'S TECH BLOG

My iPhone honeymoon is over
August 24, 2007

It will be two months next week that the iPhone has been available and I have to confess the honeymoon is over and I'm sometimes having wishful thoughts about what I could do with other phones.

Looks and style can only keep a flame burning for so long.

After the honeymoon, the character flaws begin to appear. And with the iPhone, there's no getting over one ugly shortcoming: It's the network.

The iPhone's major flaw is the AT&T EDGE Network. It is just lousy. When loading a Web site, it is so slow as to be all but useless. E-mail isn't much better. They arrive fine, but opening them often takes forever over EDGE. And there have been several instances where it seems as if the entire network has been inaccessible for gone down for prolonged periods of time.

I have now started to look admiringly at other phones with true push e-mail, phones that work with corporate mail servers.

Last week, I added a clever workaround from a company called Synchronica that reroutes my work e-mail through their servers and sends them to a special iPhone account. But they only have a 60-day trial of the service and after it expires, there will be a monthly fee. I don't need any more iPhone monthly fees, not when Sprint and Verizon offer true push e-mail at real 3g Internet speeds, instead of the EDGE network's sloppy slowness.

If EDGE worked like a real data network should today, I wouldn't think of straying.

But its inadequacies are exasperated by other iPhone failings, like:

•Not being able to mass delete e-mail. You have to do so one by one. And if you do it too fast, the iPhone chokes and stalls, sometimes taking 30 seconds to complete the deletion.

•Bluetooth range that is limited to about two feet, instead of the 30 feet Apple claims. I've tried this with two different iPhones now and two different Bluetooth devices (including the Apple Bluetooth) and it's the same.

•No cut and paste function. You'd think this would be basic on any phone that handles data.

•A lack of other applications. Apple's design locks out third-party programs.

•Lame ring tones and the inability to add or customize your own.

•Only access to a fraction of the YouTube videos

All these other flaws are relatively minor. I can live with them temporarily. Most are fixable by upgrades that Apple or its service partners can provide.

The network, alas, can't be. At least on these first-generation iPhones which are locked into EDGE because of the chipset Apple installed in the phone.

But then, so am I locked into this, thanks to a two-year contract required by AT&T. Will I separate from the iPhone? I don't honestly know. I hope Apple sends along an update soon to fix the things that can be fixed.

But as for EDGE, it definitely doesn't have one, at least compared to the other data networks.

So there. That's the status of my relationship with the iPhone. We're still together. It still is a looker. But familiarity and the underlying design issues that its style and form fun covered up are starting to be more and more irritating.

Originally Posted by Eric5273

You have to get over the whole 9/11 thing buddy.

Originally Posted by Winston Churchill

Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.