Discount Competence

I hung up the phone from a conversation with a friend on Saturday and noticed that, once again, my phone had lost all of its saved email and sent/received calls. I had been trying to talk myself out of buying an iPhone since they had gone on sale about 24 hours prior, but this was the last straw. I was getting an iPhone. I drove to the mall, parked, walked inside, and had an 8GB iPhone within about 15 minutes. I was psyched. I quickly drove home, opened the package and began to drool over my new toy. I carefully removed it from its packaging, connected the USB cable, and after a quick upgrade to the newest iTunes, I was minutes away from euphoria — or so I thought.

The iTunes registration went quickly until it arrived at the final screen which said “now activating iPhone, this process may take up to 3 minutes,” or something to that effect. 3 minutes went by, the progress bar reached its end, and I received a notice telling me that my activation required further processing. I won’t get into more detail here, you can read plenty of posts about AT&T’s activation snafu elsewhere on the web. Suffice it to say that this thing is a complete brick until AT&T activates it — the only thing you can do is make an emergency call, turn it on and off, and look at the IMEI number.

After about 24 hours, that long awaited email containing the iTunes link arrived. My phone was activated. Now, lets get down to brass tacks. The first thing I noticed was that there was no copy/paste functionality. One of the worst effects of this was that when I was setting up my email accounts, I had to type the domain 4 times, once for the address, once for the username, once for the incoming mail server, and once for the outgoing mail server. Next I was interrupted by a little blue ‘popup’ while I was a few menu levels deep into the iPhones settings — a text message from my friend David congratulating me on my new purchase (he loves his iPhone by the way). I clicked “view” so I could respond to his SMS. Once I did, I noticed that I was not taken back to the menu multiple levels deep where I was previously playing. Instead it just sat there at the SMS screen. I looked around in search of a breadcrumb-like ‘back’ button — nowhere to be found. Ok, I clicked the ‘home’ button, and re-navigated myself down, down, down to the place I was before.

I was done playing with the settings. It was time to set up my work email. Against advice that I have not been able to give, my company uses Exchange. I went into the area where you create a new email account and clicked on “Exchange” (my other options were “POP3″ and “IMAP”). A note appeared near the top of the setup page stating that the Exchange server must have IMAP support. What ? Why even bother having an “Exchange” and an “IMAP” mail type if the Exchange server has to be an IMAP server. No OWA support? This was a huge problem. Speaking of Exchange mail, where is that “IMAP-Push” service that Stevie was talking about in that first keynote? After a little research I found out that the iPhone does, indeed, support “IMAP-Push” (also known as IDLE — a technology that has been around for about 10 years). The iPhone supports IDLE, but only for Yahoo! accounts. I don’t have a Yahoo! account, nor do I care to create one. I need to be able to check my work email. Our Exchange admins, in following best practices for that particular piece of software, do not have IMAP turned on.

No work email — strike #1 — I can’t have a $600 phone that doesn’t check my work email.

I thought about ways to get around this, perhaps writing some kind of program that I would install on my personal server to pull my email via OWA and stick into an IMAP account (which it will only check as ‘frequently’ as every 15 minutes). I have a huge deadline coming up and there’s no way I’ll be able to test this theory before the 14 day return period. I put the phone down.

A little while later is buzzed. I picked it up and pressed the ‘home’ button to see why. What did I see? Nothing. There was no little ‘popup’ this time — nothing to tell my why it buzzed — it just did. At this point I checked my SMS messages and there were none. I saw that I had quite a few unread emails, but of course, I had unread emails before. Which account got the new mail? No clues. I descended into the email area and noticed another annoyance. There is no unified Inbox. I had to navigate from the ‘email’ home area, into each account, into the inbox folder to see what mail had arrived then back, back again, and down into the next account. I didn’t remember what unread messages I had before and I was left not knowing to which account my new email had arrived.

Another thing I noticed while searching for my phantom email was that there are no filters. My main account showed the last 25 messages I had received and they were all spam.

No email filters — strike #2 — I get too much email every day to have to dig through 3 ‘pages’ of email - 25 at a time - until I get to a non-spam message.

Finally, I hit strike #3. You can’t use it as a bluetooth modem. I was absolutely appalled to find this out. This, combined with my aforementioned killers and gripes and the fact that there is no IM client or MMS capability lead me to returning the iPhone and going back using a Blackberry.

I’d consider buying one again, if apple fixes the above issues, but until then, I’d classifly this as a toy. I dismissed all of the “The iPhone is not a business device” as FUD spread by the haters, but I was wrong. Tomorrow, I’ll go to the apple store, return my iphone and buy another Blackberry. I think Stevie needs to take into serious consideration who his market is and who actually has $600 to spend on a phone.

But what do I know?