markh’s posterous

Why it’s cool:

1.       Apps. Without them, the iPhone is just a phone. The apps bring content and utility to the phone that make it relevant and make me want to take it everywhere. This is a huge deal and game-changing. WorldView, Yelp, Loopt, last.fm, Mint -- all great extensions of my online life.

2.       iTunes Content. Kind of a no brainer, but it’s also a reason why the phone ain't hot. See below.

3.       Cheaper than Blackberry. I had an enterprise Blackberry plan. I saved $15/month with the iPhone data plan since I could use ActiveSync. So the phone pays for itself relatively quickly.

4.       GPS intelligence is pretty awesome. I like being location-aware. Loopt, Google Maps are all decent.

5.       Call quality. So far, no problems, but seems like I’m alone here? I like listening to my calls in stereo through the headphones, too. That’s actually pretty useful vs having an ear exposed with my Bluetooth dongle.

Why it sucks:

1.       Instability. What kind of phone encourages you to reboot it daily for best performance? Too many times apps have been sluggish, or flat out crashed – Apple-created apps, included. The No. 1 support response? Reboot your phone? WTF?

2.       Incredibly crappy inefficient UI. No search. No “back” button while navigating around. No copy and paste. No click and drag. Too many clicks to get to anything. Perhaps one of the most inefficient inbox UIs ever. (Ever tried looking at an inbox with 50 emails in it?) This almost makes me want to go back to Blackberry. If it weren’t for the apps, I probably would. How in the world does a company who specializes in user-friendly UI create such a terrible one? A Blackberry UI is better? Really? My expectations are higher.

3.       iTunes Content. One iTunes Library per iPhone. Syncing my music content has been the biggest pain in the ass. I can’t just drag my music from my Library into my phone. I had to create a playlist with everything, and sync the playlist. I think this is just a bug with my account, but I cannot find anyway to fix this, and it drives me nuts.

4.       No intelligent spellcheck. Why doesn’t the iPhone learn my words by analyzing my emails and contacts or my typo corrections. Blackberry does this beautifully.

5.       No video camera. How hard is this really?

6.       Terrible regular camera. No zoom. No flash. Nice pictures, but you gotta be in a just-right setting.

7.       Battery life. I'm tethered to power cables, damn you.

Things that I thought sucked first, but I’m growing to accept, although they are not cool yet:

1.       Keyboard. I thought I’d miss my keyboard, but it’s been an OK transition.

2.       3G really isn’t that fast. Sure it’s the only way possible to download some of this content, but it’s definitely left me waiting, staring at my screen waiting for things to happen.

3.       Size. It’s bigger than my Pearl, but it’s growing on me.

The one thing I thought an iPhone would do was encourage me to go buy a Mac. Well, if anything, I’m less interested than ever before, which disappoints me. I switched off of Macs in the 90s when Mac stability frankly was no better than Windows 98, which wasn’t good. But Windows XP was a pretty solid platform. It had problems, but stability really didn’t feel like one of them. Vista has its issues, but again, stability doesn’t appear to be one of them.

The iPhone brings back all those nightmares about crashes and reboots. If this is a sign of progress from Apple, then I’m gonna wait to buy back into Mac. I really want to try though! Maybe it's just phones, and the Mac OS is pretty decent actually? I'd love to adopt the new user experiences and learn from them... I've always wanted garage band. :(

If you have any ideas on how to get around my issues, please send them along! I wish my list of "why cool" were much longer and "why sucky" were much shorter!