I believe that it was still using 8 year old software, may be 10 year old software by now. But I will say from my time owning one , that it was reliable and did what I wanted it to do. The only thing that I would have wanted was the mmc version with 3g, but it was superceded by new technology.
Declan
Well what are ya waiting for , if you have not already done so , start a pre thread.
All I have heard is the paid reviews, both pro and con , so I want to get the details from a normal user based on your use of the phone, good , bad , indifferent.
Declan
In truth I haven’t been impressed with the iPhone GUI which I have tried quite frequently. I think it works very well for a few things like navigating maps and photo collections but not for a lot of others. For one thing I like the feedback that physical keys give you and the muscle memory that helps you build up. I find a physical keyboard vastly easier to use than a virtual one. And after a while the iPhone screen gets covered in ugly smudges I don’t particularly care for. The iPhone is also a lot harder to use with one hand than the phones I have owned.
As for a “well written application” I find iTunes a confusing and sluggish mess and I am clearly not the only one. I have problems with Nokia’s PC Suite as well but it does most of what I want and it’s not as bad as iTunes.
Oh please. This is tired. The vast, VAST majority of people who bitch about iTunes haven’t taken 5 minutes to go through the preferences tab to see what their options actually are. The small minority of iTunes haters hate it for legitimate reasons, i.e. for some power-user type use.
**Gross Generalization: ** 95% of iTunes issues can be solved by either unchecking the “sync” button or enabling their new computer to that device.
I am no Apple fanboy. I have owned several PCs over the years and don’t ever plan to switch. I am, however, a huge iPhone fanboy. I’ve had mine for just shy of a year and I am absolutely in love with it. I do tend to agree, though, that it’s reached about the end of its awesomeness. In the next few years they’ll have models with faster data access and more memory. 4G will eventually happen. They’ll probably have more model choices and cool shell colors or whatever too. They probably won’t have anything truly revolutionary though but that’s fine with me. I can’t imagine what else I would need.
I am a little bummed about one thing that I read this morning. The 3GS will not be available to 3G owners at the listed price, even if you extend your AT&T contract. It looks like I’ll have to wait six months for that better camera.
The problem becomes changing things just because you can. If the UI works and works well, there would be a risk in changing it to make it flashy, at the risk of making it worse.
Their designs have always been very minimalistic, once you have a bar of metal and a glass plate, what else is there to do? They changed the back to plastic due to the additional radios, but after that, how do you change one button, a glass front, and a plastic back? Do you need to?
In truth for me, they could have made it bigger. Right now my thoughts are on picking up a netbook that would probably solve this issue, but no I expect apple will let the product line mature, so they can maximize their shareholder value and make money.
Some incremental features would be nice though, a more smudge resistant screen comes to mind as I write this. Also physically a small scroll wheel or rocker switch to scroll safari up and down, nothing irks me more at this point that swishing the page and hitting a hyper link by mistake.
I want my phone to do a lot of things, but I am realistic about what the phone can do given the size limitations, a larger unit would probably appeal to a portion of the user base, but at this time it’s a non starter.
Declan
I don’t buy it. I’ve gone through every option screen 10 times, and I’ve been tweaking computer software since I was about 12 years old. It’s terribly written. I wish I’d have written down about the 25 times I discovered a new quirk about it that pissed me off, since I’ve forgotten most of it.
The number 1 issue that makes it terrible bloatware is that I have a 4.2 ghz 45nm dual core processor, 4 gbs of ram, a top end motherboard, and very fast hard drives, and it runs sluggishly. It’s a fucking media manager, and I have more computing power than existed in the entire world 40 years ago, and I apparently can’t handle it.
I’m not a blind Apple basher - I hate Apple fanboys, but I grudgingly admit that my ipod touch is the coolest gadget I’ve ever owned, it’s nearly perfect. But itunes? atrocious.
Last year, when I bought my 3G, I paid full price for it- because I was only a year into my contract and I wasn’t eligible for the upgrade price.
What they didn’t tell me, though, was that switching over to the iPhone- even buying it outright- automatically extends your contract another two years. So, THIS year, I’m not eligible, either- so if I want the new version, I’d have to buy it at full price, as well. Bastards.
Anyway, yesterday I sat down to figure out how much it’d cost me if I just canceled my account and signed up as a new customer. It’s pretty damn tempting, and I’ll be a bit surprised if a lot of people don’t end up doing this.
The early termination fee is $175… but it’s prorated five dollars for every month you’ve been on the contract, which puts my termination fee at $115. Add that to the “new customer” price on the 32 meg version, and I’d still end up saving something like three hundred bucks over buying it for the full price.
I mean, hell, they’re going to extend my contract another two years if I buy the phone outright anyway, right? The only thing I’m concerned about is keeping my phone number… but as I’ve recently moved all the way across the country, I was thinking about doing that, anyway.
Anyone see a problem with this plan?
Would the early termination hurt your credit?
Now that is fucked up.
Not if you don’t mind a different phone number. You might be able to get $50 for your old phone too.
But I would put you in the power user category. Clearly, you know exactly what you expect it to be able to do, and if it can’t be able to tweak it to do so. Yeah - it’s sluggish. I don’t know why, don’t care. All I know is that it runs support for my ipod and iphone flawlessly, because I don’t demand much from it, and I know what iTunes does and can be tweaked to do. I have little knowledge beyond that, so my expectations are lower than yours. I just get tired of hearing the endless parade of stupid complaints:
“iTunes sucks - “shuffle” is hardly random! Songs by the same artist appear after each other ALL the time!” – Adjust your “randomness” setting.
“Every time I add a song from my brother’s computer, iTunes deletes it when I sync it with my computer!” – Uncheck “sync music”.
“iTunes sucks - I can’t just add a song to my ipod!” – Click and drag from your library to the ipod icon. If that doesn’t work, authorize the computer.
Etc., etc., etc.
iTunes sucks: it randomly deleted a shitload of songs from my music library and made dozens of duplicates of other songs, for no apparent reason. Took me a couple of hours to reinstall iTunes, recreate my music library, wipe and reinstall the music to my iPod.
iTunes sucks: the backup/restore feature for the iPhone is painfully slow and only maintains the most recent backup, rather than allowing you to easily archive and restore any number of past backups. (Why?)
I love my iPod and iPhone, but I’m surprised to see anyone defending the bloated piece of crap that is iTunes.
This article would seem to indicate that it would only affect my credit if I refused to pay it.
Not trying to be an apologist, because I’ve experienced exactly the same behavior as you, but I haven’t had any problems since I took a couple of weeks to:
-manually move the music to a folder, with no dupes
-told iTunes to leave the structure alone
It’s been more than a year since and no problems.
iTunes is not a great piece of software. If I didn’t have an iPhone I wouldn’t even install it. As far as audio players go I far prefer foobar 2000. (Smaller footprint, easier to customize to do pretty much anything, runs quickly all the time.) Having said that, looking at iTunes as a piece of software written to communicate with a device it is actually pretty good. There are plenty of settings to make things work. And, with a fast enough computer the sluggishness is not as noticeable. I do think the fact that it will search for album covers even for mp3s you already had (Which is my whole library I have never paid for a song from iTunes) and it finds it pretty much all the time is pretty cool. Compared to the awful bloatware for the Blackberry storm it is awesome. Or, the awful stuff some camera makers insist you install.
You can use the Phone, answering service, E-mail client, text, play games, take pictures, listen to music, get maps, directions, find a nearby place to eat…
“F**K APPLE!!! The camera is only 1MP and not 3MP!!!” 
Louis CK was right. Everything is amazing and nobody’s happy.
I have been reading a little more about this. It turns out that after you cancel a contract, you have to wait 90 days to sign up with AT&T again and be considered a “new” customer.
just a quick comment, but concidering the rising firestorm of protests, plus rumors of apple being really unhappy with AT&T , has the iPhone become a tar baby for AT&T. Could an argument be made that they are fufilling the letter of their contract, but not the spirit of the contract.
Declan
Huh. That’s lame, but unsurprising; a bit of looking around on the net indicates that others are intending to do what I was suggesting, and I imagine that ATT is pretty scared of everyone doing it. We’ll have to see how it works out.