iPhone rant aka. If I had known this beforehand I would have never bought an iPhone

After having lived with the iPhone 3GS for a few months now I've actually come to resent it.

Don't get me wrong, it's an absolutely amazing piece of technology, the truly sad part is that it's full potential will never be reached due to Apples defective by design philosophy or whatever you want to call it makes this so called "smart phone" into an IDIOT phone. The constricting hold Apple has over it is so strangulating and painful that I can, for the life of me, not understand why anyone would praise them.

So this is (with all likelihood, only the beginning of) my list of functions that are missing that I consider a must if a smart phone is to be called a SMART Phone that are missing in the iPhone:

• Native support for recording phone calls and saving voice mail as an audio file.

This one I have zero understanding for why it has not been implemented from the word Go in the Apple factory. Every smart phone worth a damn has some kind of, or the full feature, but with the iPhone you can't. Why can't you? Because you can't, that's why.

The only way you can do it is by using an external service that cost loads of money and god knows who at those companies are getting their rocks off listening to the recordings of your wife giving you the grocery list, or your daughter asking you to buy a specific brand hygiene articles that you can never remember the name of...

• Unoptimized aka. "un-fucked up" photo synchronization.

Syncing photos to the iPhone is smooth and easy and ruins pretty much every photo you take. Even photos taken BY the iPhone (!) is ruined by this so called optimization when you add them to the library that is synced.

What is the optimization you ask: It's a cashing of thumbnails that are optimized to give a smoother experience when viewing photos on the iPhone. Too bad that the photos aren't worth watching after optimization. But Hey! At least it's a smooth and fast view through lowrez crap copies of the beautiful fullrez photos you wanted to sync.

• File access, what is that?

One of my main beefs with the iPhone is that you don't have file access to it, you have to use a wifi sync app or some other buttfugly online sync hack to get your spreadsheets, pdf's and documents to the damn thing, not to mention the hassle of getting them back to a computer. I have 32GB of storage space that I can't use for anything but the pre-approved and very limited uses that Apple decided I am allowed (!?) to use it for.

Even a sandbox storage, isolated from the apps and function of the phone's OS, would have been better than no access at all.

• FLAC and ogg Vorbis support.

If you allow mp3's on the damn thing why not FLAC and ogg? Seriously, ogg is in every respect a superior format compared to mp3. FLAC is what I rip my CDs to at home but they can't be used either. Apple Lossless you say? Why would I use a proprietary, defective by design, format when I have a free one that is just as good, just as easy and a whole lot less painfull to rip to at my disposal? And on top of that, I can play the music I PAID FOR (!) in EVERY (!) damn mediaplayer I wish instead of just in crappy iTunes.

• Native support for syncing notes and text files.

In order to sync notes you make in the native Notes app you need to have Outlook (the full outlook, express won't do) installed on your computer, and the notes are synced to the notes function in that program. Well, safe to say, I haven't installed Outlook, nor have I bothered using the Notes app to any greater extent, despite that writing on the iPhone is such a pleasure compared to most other (real) smart phones. Instead, I have to resort to yet another buttfugly online hack by writing my notes in the mail app and mailing them to myself. I mean seriously, is syncing simple text files to a windows computer too hard for Apple? Do they really need big brother Microsoft's program just to be able to perform such a ridiculously simple task?

• Built in equalizer.

So let me get this straight; the iPhone is, when push comes to shove, an iPod Touch with an added phone function right? So it's supposed to be a really kick ass mp3 player right? Then why, for all that is holy, is there no equalizer built into the damn thing? Why do you only have a bunch of crappy presets to chose from? Even iTunes have a real equalizer that you can set yourself (not that it makes any difference), but the iPhone? Nope.

I have never owned an mp3 player that hasn't had some form of graphical equalizer, everything from creative Zen's to Sandisk Sansa's. And now the supposedly most kick ass player in the world doesn't have such a basic function? You have got to be kidding me!?

• Native support for building and editing playlists.

This is another one of my true annoyances. When do you want to create playlists? WHEN YOU LISTEN TO MUSIC! And since I never use iTunes for listening to music (since its a piece of crap bloatware) I want to make my playlists in the phone where I actually listen to the music.

Sure you have one, thats ONE, 1, uno, ein, en, on-the-go playlist that you can mess around with but after you sync the phone after having created it, it becomes a static on the go (that isn't on the go anymore) playlist that you can do dick shit with other than play.

This I find outright pathetic, why can't I edit my playlists? Because Apple for some inexplicable reason doesn't want me to. Is it a wonder that I'm starting to feel paranoid about what else Apple doesn't want me to do? Why on earth implement playlists in the first place if you don't allow editing of said playlists in the player!?

• Editing audio and video meta data.

So you sync an album onto your iPhone, then pull up the album list and find that you have not one, but two, seemingly identical albums, by the same artist on the phone. WTF?

On closer inspection you find that in one of the identical albums you have all but one song, and in the other, the missing song. So how do you fix that? Not in your phone, nu-huh.. You have to fix it manually, in iTunes (shudders), then (!!!!!!) Resync the album (!!!!!!!!?) to get all the songs into the same album.

Why on earth is there no way to edit the meta data of your audiofiles on the iPhone? Seriously..

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There is probably a whole lot more that I find annoying, these are just my main annoyances with the stupid thing. When I first got it I though I had finally found a phone worth the money, a phone that would not just be my companion and my friend, but also an ever present outlet for my creativity, somewhere I could write and explore when the mood struck instead of having to force myself into an artificial state of creativity in front of my computer.

It is with the bitter taste of having been royally deceived that write this. The freedom I had so longed for in my cell phone is but a mirage, the iPhone is so limited, not by it's technology mind you, it's a beautiful piece of tech, but by the squeezing iron fist of Apple. Owning an iPhone, really makes me feel like I sold my soul to the devil. I was given the illusion that this would be the phone that would finally set me free, allow me to explore my creative side no matter where I was or what I did. Boy was I wrong..

So, in conclusion, had I known this before I bought it, I would have shown my finger to the sales person and looked elsewhere to find a REAL Smart Phone instead.

iAd, iPad, iPhone rant

Ok, so I bough an iPhone 3GS a while back and have had a whole lot of fun playing around with it. It's basically the perfect Apple Product, it works, it's clean and it's easy and intuitive to use.

As a long time windows user, and occasional Linux user I have never seen any advantage to even try Apples computers and regarded them as inferior products due the the obvious and genuinely ridiculous limits of the users ability to control the system, but the phone is just amazing.


iPad
Enter the iPad, it's a cool gadget, I give them that. The Star Trek Data Pad feel of it is pretty darn cool but in the end I can't help asking; What is it good for? What can you do with it that you can't do on a regular laptop? How limited is the user experience in comparison to a regular, similarly priced, laptop?

The simple truth is, the star trek data pad feel is just not going to cut it, it has to be some kind of revolution in technology if it's going to make it through the initial hype. Being a cool gadget isn't enough in todays world.


iPhone
iPhone on the other hand was a revolution in technology, it's intuitive user interface and excellent build was the perfect merger in order to build a success both in terms of monetary gain and enjoyment for the end user.

So now Apple has announced the iAd program, something I first reeled at as a real Apple (TM) buttfuck of their end users before I did a couple of searches on what it would mean to me as an iPhone user.


iAd
This is what I came up with after sifting through post after post, announcement after announcement. I could be wrong mind you, don't take anything I write here as anything other than a summary of what I have understood, the Apple iAd program can be a fully different beast altogether and I could be completely mistaken about some or all of the conclusions I've reached.


Most free apps are supported by ads today, there are only a select few that are truly FREE, we are already used to the ad supported programs offering an ad-free version for a price. So there is a way to "opt out" of ads by paying for the software instead.

My first impression of iAd was that it would place ads in formerly ad-free, paid apps until I started digging a bit more. iAd, as far as I can see it, is an API for the developers to support their free software in a more uniform and ordered manner than before.

Apps containing ads today exits you from the app if you tap an ad and starts up the web browser instead. This is annoying, and the accidental tap on an ad can ruin half an hour of work in said app without you being able to stop it. This, as far as I could make out of all the drivel on the web, is what Apple is trying to counter, by offering this API they are giving the developers and in the end the end users, a more streamlined way to support their apps through ads without wrecking havoc with the work you've done with the ad-supported app. This I see as a real breakthrough for Apple and if it is as I have managed to understand it, I applaud it with my honest approval.

There are a couple of concerns though, the fact that I've read on several locations that the ads WILL HAVE ACCESS to your location (through GPS and the accelerometer) is something I see a serious privacy concern with. Where I'm at and what I do is my business alone. I sincerely hope that Apple will allow you to block ads from reading the GPS and accelerometer.

The second worry I have is the same as with the ads we have in ad-supported apps today, bandwidth. Most of us iPhone users where I live have a limited bandwidth per month to connect to the internet through our phones. I can't help wondering how much data will the ads pull down from the net through the mobile connection? How much of the bandwidth I pay for will be wasted on ads?

The third concern is a pretty ridiculous one, though I would hope it will correct itself from the way users decide purchase software. My worry is that paid apps will contain ads outside the control of the developers, that the opt-out through paying for the app will not result in an ad-free environment on your phone.