Bought an iPhone. I hate Myself.

I hate myself for loving you,
Can’t break free from the things that you do.
I wanna walk but I run back to you
That’s why I hate myself for lovin’ you.”

- from the song, “I Hate Myself for Loving You” by Joan Jett

After my good friend and fellow iPhone detractor/commiserator, Shawn, caved in a bought an iPhone a couple of weeks ago I felt alone in the world – the last iPhone holdout and bastion of defense for all those trying to avoid the Apple consumer electronics vortex.

But alas, late last week I succumbed to His Steveness of the mighty land of Cupertino and handed over my self respect and a wad of cash to acquire an iPhone 3G (black, 16GB).  I love it and I hate it all at the same time.

I hate it because . . .

• First and foremost, it’s a totally closed environment – both hardware and software.  You can’t change the battery or add memory.  You can add any program you want to it, as long as Apple approves of it and the developer gives a piece of the action to Apple.  Oh yeah, it can’t compete with anything Apple provides and you have to download it through their exclusive portal (iTunes).  Hey Steve, you might think of seeking some help for this control obsession.
• It only has partial Exchange support.  In a typical Apple too-weird-to-be-true fashion, the company decided, after paying Microsoft for an ActiveSync license, to only support some Exchange functionality.  Not only are Tasks and Notes completely ignored, but basic functionality like message status (sent/reply/forward) is never set on the server and categories are totally absent.  See The iPhone Exchange Issues List for more.
• The iPhone assumes that’s it always connected to the internet and, as such, acts alone and abandoned when a signal can’t be found.  Some apps just wait around forever, calling home in their best E.T. fashion, some crash, and others just don’t work as expected.  Why, for example, can’t I read my email when I’m not tethered to the ether?  Because the mail app only downloads a few lines of a pushed message.  You don’t get the rest of the message until you select the header and you only get that if you have a current connection.  Doesn’t anyone at Apple fly on planes?  They’re really not a bad place to read email.
• The phone’s OS can deal with precisely one task at a time.  At least from an application level.  Want to download email and check stock prices simultaneously?  Buy two iPhones.  3G is nice, but even when you can get a 3G signal, it’s not instantaneous.  Viewing a complex web page can take time.  Why can’t I go do something else while it loads?
• It lacks some little stuff that other mobile phones have been doing for a while.  There’s no cut/copy and paste, no landscape email, and no Flash.
• The virtual/on screen keyboard (or whatever Apple calls it) is only redeemed by the truly amazing dictionary function that corrects the word you are typing while you type it.  Otherwise, recipients of my email would think my messages are from “qo;k” instead of “Will.”  A physical keyboard is way better.
• Did I mention it’s completely closed?

So, if you made it through all my whining, you’re asking yourself what could have possibly redeemed the iPhone enough to make me purchase it.  In the end, it’s mostly the lack of competition and my crack addiction-like need for new gadgets.  If there were a Windows Mobile phone (a Mobile OS that has been around for a while and has none of the flaws above) that had a big screen, a touch UI that worked with adult fingers and a great or rapidly growing infrastructure like Apple’s App Store, I would never have even considered the iPhone.  Similarly, if RIM (who knows business phones better?), which is aggressively pushing into this segment with the Blackberry Storm, the Blackberry Bold and their own app store were to finally deliver the devices and clean up more of their UI act, I would happily go that direction.

In the mean time, the popularity of the device and the cool apps being added on a minute-by-minute basis (many of them exclusive to the iPhone) make it marginally functional as a business phone and exceedingly interesting as a toy.  I’ll be thrilled when someone steps up and unseats the current king from its thrown.  Android/Google, Microsoft, RIM are you listening?

. . . I will not become an Apple or iPhone fanboy . . .

. . . I will not become an Apple or iPhone fanboy . . .

. . . I will not become an Apple or iPhone fanboy . . .

. . . I will not become an Apple or iPhone fanboy . . .