July 18, 2007 by Matt Cassarino (Seattle WA)

So, you wanna know what it’s like to have an iPhone?

My iPhone experience has been bitter sweet. Ya see, I just bought it a few weeks ago. In fact, I was one of those guys who waited in line at the store to get one.

The box was cool. The experience in opening it up and checking out all the parts was very cool. Very simple. It’s like I didn’t have to read anything or know anything. Just plug the sucker into iTunes and you’re good to go in about 3 minutes. Amazing how easy this was. I can’t think of many ways that it could’ve been better, except I would have liked to known that it was only going to take 3 minutes. But I was very happily surprised when I finished the process and my phone was working right then and there. I hear that non AT&T (Cingular) users went through hell and back, but for me it was a breeze. I tested it out and was off and running with a smile and a good feeling about my new investment.

So my phone works and it’s super easy to use. And fun. It was so cool setting the weather for different cities I used to live in (to see if I made a good move in moving and enjoy the memories) and setting a few stocks, although my Ft. Polio is such a wimp right now.

The iPhone was like a dream for the first week. It was over the 4 th of July weekend, so naturally we’d all be at our family parties, or with our best friends enjoying and celebrating this wonderful country and our lives. And the boy with the iPhone was quite the center of attention at these parties, at least I was. Everyone had heard of this thing, and couldn’t wait to play with it. It was our chance to chase a dream, the dream of making our lives better. This little device was our ticket, and every body wanted one. Or at least wanted to play with one and ooh and ahh over how cool it was. Probably a re-enactment of what used to happen 50 years ago when the first families got their TV’s, these little10” babies that connected us to the world.

… off to sleep for the night …

OK, so I’m back after a good night’s sleep and ready to finish this story. I’ve gotta tell ya, my iPhone was really cool right out of the gates. The interface was so easy to use, so intuitive, that you didn’t even need to read the manual. You didn’t need to do anything but start playing with it, and it was a snap to figure out. I was amazed at how intuitive the interface was, from looking up stock quotes to browsing the web. Adding contacts was a snap, and you could take their picture with the built in camera and assign it to them in a few super easy (and fun!) steps. Especially the resizing and zooming on the photo you just took. Or it was just as easy to email that same photo to any email address. It was so nice just to be automatically and always online. No connecting, no searching for network. Just online 24/7 the way it was meant to be.

It didn’t take long for me to figure out the first software issue, or should I say, opportunity for improvement in the user experience. You can’t assign a photo to a contact that doesn’t already exist in your Contacts. So, you take someone’s picture and you want to assign it to them, enter their phone, email, etc, but if they are not already one of your contacts, you will have to exit the process, enter Contacts and add them, THEN assign the photo to them. This is annoying more than anything, but I’ve found myself wanting that functionality more than a few times already. Shouldn’t be too much of a software fix there. I wondered at the time, hmmm, what other little tweaks will I be finding?

I was very excited to synch up my 2 gmail accounts with my iPhone and do my email on the go like everyone else with their Blackberrys. This to me was a major reason for purchasing this baby in the first place – to make me more efficient and more connected to my digital communications. Believe me, it’s nice to get work done without having to sit in front of my home office computer! I had no trouble programming my personal Gmail account into iPhone, and it began downloading my messages 25 at a time. This won’t take long, I thought, seeing that I had about 50 messages currently in my Inbox. But iPhone kept at it for a while, and soon I had downloaded over 200 messages. What the hell’s going on? It seemed that this little bugger was going to download every unread message in my account, which would be literally thousands of messages. (I am a website developer and copy myself on many of my clients’ web forms for quality control and tracking purposes, and I have created Gmail filters for many of these messages, having them bypass the Inbox and labeled accordingly.) This wasn’t going to fly. I halted the download and checked my iPhone settings. Nothing on this, so I figured it was something I could control in my Gmail account. There was one setting about synching new messages only, so I figured this was the trick. Nodda. In fact, when I reconnected my iPhone to this account, it not only downloaded a bunch of old ass messages, but it even downloaded my SENT messages as new emails. WTF? Are you kidding me? I had to pull the plug on this operation and figured that I’d get to this later when I had more time and/or an Apple Genius to help me figure it out. Strike one iPhone, this is a big offense and you’d better bet your ass that my email account(s) will be accessible from my iPhone without all this ridiculous headache.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll be thinking, “Hey, no worries, just use the web browser and send your Gmail directly from the website.” Which is what I tried next, but was quickly denied a usable experience. You see, the web browser is pretty cool, and it’s great that you can view the full page and not the mobile version; the zoom in and panning is super cool. But it doesn’t work well for writing email messages in Gmail. First off, the page loads are pretty slow, so just to bring up the correct message and click reply takes about 10-20 seconds. And it sucks if you accidentally select the wrong message while trying to zoom in on your Inbox. Next, I wasn’t able to actually enter text into the reply box of Gmail. Some sort of iPhone browser limitation or something. Wow, I can’t do my email on this thing.

It also seems that iPhone won’t synch directly with my Gmail account, so deleting a message here means that it will still be showing in my webmail. Are you kidding? What’s the point of that? Please tell me I’m just an idiot for not being able to figure this out. But I thought that’s what made Apple software and iPhone so great: it’s supposed to be so easy to figure out that even an idiot can do it. Well, some parts of the iPhone are that way, but not one of the most important: email.

I guess I won’t be using my iPhone for emailing right now. Bummer big time. But hopefully I’ll figure this out soon. Plus, I still have the web browser and the built-in maps, which are both very practical applications for a guy like me.

The YouTube feature sounded great, although it did seem a bit weird to have that particular site built-in to the Home screen. I guess Google and Apple are really bed buddies on this one. Right off, I tried doing a few searches for videos and was disappointed in about 30 seconds. The video search results seemed questionable (a.k.a. not relevant to my search) and the page load was frickin waaay slow. I mean, we’re back to the days of dial-up. Especially so when I actually tried to watch one of these videos. It just showed a loading screen for about 1 minute and I got frustrated and went Home. Oh well, blame this one on AT&T’s dog EDGE network. What does EDGE stand for anyways? (Good acronym suggestions escape me but use your imagination.)

I found that when I’m near an open wi-fi connection, it’s a lot faster and the iPhone seems to join that network automatically, which is cool by me. In fact, in theory, it’s perfect. Except that the default network EDGE is about as fast as dial-up. And the research I’ve done online backs this up as one of the lamer wireless broadband connections. Uh, hey Apple, did you ever think this wasn’t going to be a problem when you went exclusive with AT&T? I mean seriously, we all don’t live in Silicon Valley with crazy fast wi-fi everywhere. So that kinda sucks and hopefully enough sh-t will be hitting the fan that the EDGE will get seriously “sharpened”.

Of course, one of the first things I did being a website developer was to check out a few of my websites and see how they displayed in iPhone. I went to my newest baby, www.cooltoors.com and quickly realized that I didn’t have Flash installed on my iPhone. That’s kinda lame I thought. The Flash plug-in ships with all new browsers for the past 5 years, and it’s not installed by default on this little bad boy? Good thing I know how to download the Flash plug-in. Off to Adobe’s site, and pretty quickly I found my way to the download and the page wouldn’t fully load. Hmmm. You’d think I could download Flash. I mean come on, a ton of websites use Flash these days. How could this device from the future have an oversight like this? I quick search on Apple’s site lead to some disappointing news, matter of factly stated: the iPhone wouldn’t support Flash, nor could it support downloads. Are you shitting me? How is this going to be a usable browser if it can’t do Flash or downloads? This is a monstrous strike two. I hear that this support will be coming in the future, but not from Apple’s website. I am skeptical about how and when this will happen, but obviously I’m pissed about it. An interesting aside: it seems that iPhone can play QuickTime, Apple’s version for showing video and animated content (read: direct competitor with Flash). Is it possible that Apple is trying to make QuickTime the standard player for multimedia content? God I hope not. Seriously guys, don’t try to take down Flash. Do you know how many websites will have to be updated if QuickTime becomes the de facto player? I can see the web developers jumping out their office windows across the world. Hopefully, the QuickTime-Flash thing is a temp issue that will be fixed with a soon to come software upgrade that enables Flash. Hurry up dammit!

So, my iPhone experience is missing some of the key components that were promised to me by the advertising. I pretty much just buried my head in the sand on these, hoping that they would fix themselves. This phone still had some really cool features, like the “best iPod” Apple had ever built. I was pumped on this, and even planning the ditching of my current 60 GB pod if the phone was the music playing pimp it promised to be. It wasn’t hard to synch up select music from iTunes (due to its size, I couldn’t transfer my entire library, which was a good thing) and selected a few of my favorite playlists and they transferred quite easily. Thank you Apple, that was well done.

Playing the music was a snap, and the interface was fun to use for selecting songs. It’s still really cool to swipe your finger up and down and scroll through all of your songs. Playing a song is very easy, as is adjusting the volume, play position, and changing tracks. So far so good on this one.

My car is iPod enabled, meaning that I can plug in my iPod and play it through my car stereo. This worked, but made me think, “How can I use my phone in the car when it’s controlling my stereo from inside my glove box?” I guess I can’t, and will probably keep the 60 gigger strictly for my carTunes. Oh well.

The Cover Art deal was something I looked forward to having and showing off. I mean, how cool was that on the keynote? A mini jukebox of the album artwork that I can pass through by moving my finger! I love it. But hey, how come mine doesn’t have hardly any artwork? Dang, it seems that unless I have purchased the songs from iTunes Store, the artwork doesn’t show up automatically. Most of my music was imported from CDs. My artwork will be missing unless I manually download each piece by hand, which ain’t gonna happen. I’ve got more important things to do with my time, fortunately. That was disappointing and takes a lot of the fun out of using the Cover Art jukebox. It still pops up from time to time, usually when I sort of rotate the iPhone, but isn’t a useable way for me to select what I want to listen to. I have just been selecting from the list of song names, which isn’t nearly as sexy, but is a lot faster to find what I’m looking for. It would be great if iPhone would automatically download all of the artwork for my songs. And even better if it would transfer this artwork to my computer (or vice versa).

So, you can see, a lot of the better features of my iPhone just aren’t being used. And I’m a pretty savvy user. I pity someone that really has no clue about using technology if they are wanting to use all features of this incredibly sexy device.

Quick note on the battery and the “accelerometer” – the battery life seems to be fine, although I haven’t pushed it or watched any full length movies or anything like that yet. The accelerometer (which knows to display as portrait or landscape mode based on the orientation of the iPhone) is a bit slow, and sometimes gets it wrong, but isn’t that annoying (yet).

OK, what about the built-in 2 mega pixel camera? That sounds like something that should be pretty straightforward. And it is. It’s pretty fun to use and very easy to figure out. Especially the zoom and move factor for emailing, setting a contact photo, or your wallpaper. (A really cool detail: if I take your photo and then set your picture by zooming in a bit, it doesn’t crop the original or anything. It just remembers the zoom factor for you, but the original photo remains available for other uses. This is sweet, and also means that I can later access your photo and reset the zoom factor for you. Nicely done, software team.)

And this was one of my favorites to show off when I was sharing the iPhone with my friends. By the way, I’ve never seen anything get this kind of viral marketing. I mean, we’re talking right up there with sliced bread. Word was spreading about these iPhones like wildfire, and it seemed that everybody wanted to play with it, some knew more than others, and yet hardly anybody had one. I had no problem sharing it with my friends and even people I’d just met, and it was interesting to see how quickly people learned how to use it. And how much they enjoyed playing with it. They would typically hand it back after a few minutes and be like, “Wow. That was coooool.” Instant status symbol, which is an interesting experience.

My favorite memory so far was when I bumped into my golfing buddy on the streets of West Seattle, and he had this look on his face that meant only one thing: he had just gotten his iPhone and couldn’t wait to show it off. So I played along and oohed and ahhed for a few, then interrupted him and pretended to take a call on my iPhone! It took him a second to realize that I had one too, and we cracked up, high fived and shit, and rubbed our iPhones together in some kind of white guy high five. That was a good time, and I could tell how excited he was to have his iPhone, just like I was when I first got mine.

So, a 2 mega pixel camera that I have with me 24/7? Nice, this could be a pretty useful thing for a guy like me. And I went nuts taking pictures with my iPhone. Partly to just show off the coolness of it, and also because it’s nice to have pix from family get-togethers and a friend’s birthday party on the sailboat. “I will never be without my camera again!” I thought. Except that there’s no way to transfer the photos from my iPhone to my computer. Are you nuts! Come on, I mean, seriously, don’t you think this might be a feature that your users would want? But I can’t find a way come hell or high water to access these photos and copy them to my computer. Maybe there’s a way using iPhoto or some BS, but I don’t use iPhoto and don’t want to either. I want to cut and paste these bad boys just like I do with my digital camera. No dice, and that really sucks.

What to do? I have to email individually each photo from my iPhone to myself. This blows. And I can’t send more than one at a time. The Email Photo functionality is disabled while one message is being sent, which takes about 30 seconds. So I had to waste about 20 minutes emailing 15 photos to myself. Wow, that’s a pretty big strike 3.

Turns out that the photo quality ain’t bad, I think it’s 640 x 480, which is borderline usable for website content, and certainly good enough for a funny picture or a simple hello. And in comparison with my old cell phone’s utility for taking pictures, at least I’m not wasting my time deleting 200 completely black photos of my pants pockets.

What about SMS (text messaging) ? Now, I am admittedly not a heavy text user, but I can see the value in it and I do it occasionally with my closest friends. And the iPhone rocks at SMS. It keeps track of the entire conversations, and even has a beautiful UI (user interface) separating yours from mine by color for each “conversation” that I’m having with each person. Very cool. Very usable. Very lame that I only get 200 free texts per month with my package, because I can see myself easily busting that number in no time. Well done Apple, this one is perfect.

And the keyboard is pretty amazing too. It does take a bit of practice to find what works best for you and your fingers, but once you get the hang of it and start typing with confidence, it’s the best keyboard I’ve seen yet for handheld devices. Presently, I hold the iPhone in my left hand, using my left thumb and right pointer to type. The auto-correction is very sharp, and fixes practically every mistake I make (which is a lot when I’m going fast). It’s pretty amazing how it knows the right word based on my spelling mistake. You just have to be careful when typing a more common word that has many potential misspellings. I’m typing around 30 wpm right now, or so it seems, which is amazingly faster than I used to be on my old cell, the Samsung e317, which is a total piece of crap for SMS.

The best part about the auto-correction is this: if iPhone suggests a word while you are typing, all you have to do is press the space bar and that word will fall into place. This is great if you are typing away and enter every letter of every word. When you press space, it will auto-correct any misspellings as you go. Very cool. However, this also means that the wrong suggested word can easily be accepted by you if you press space. You actually have to tap on an little “x” next to the suggested word to decline it. This, more than anything, slows your momentum while typing and is kind of annoying. Not strike-worthy, because it doesn’t happen that often, but something that could still be a significant improvement in the future.

I guess that about covers the main features that I’ve been using on my iPhone. The alarms are pretty cool and fun to set, especially because you can type a custom message to yourself, which saves my butt. (On my old phone, the alarm would go off at some point in the day, and I’d be like, “Sweet. What the hell was that supposed to remind me of?”). I haven’t used the timer or stopwatch much, or the world clocks. But these are all very simple to figure out and nice to know they’re there.

I haven’t yet synched my Calendar on the iPhone, mostly because I use Google Calendar and not iCal. But I hear that I can connect iCal (on my laptop) to Google, and then connect my iPhone to iCal. No idea if this will actually work, and it’s not the most elegant solution, which is why I have been putting it off. But I’ll probably do it sooner or later because it would be nice to have this info easily accessible on the go.

Which begs the question: What happens when I lose my iPhone? I mean, the lucky one who finds it will have a boat load of info on me! If they were malicious (and if I had my email figured out) they could wreak some serious havoc on my life. Not to mention the $650 kick in the crotch I’d be icing for a while.

There should be some sort of security code or lockdown that I can initiate from iTunes whenever, wherever. That would be a nice touch.

I haven’t researched insurance yet, but need to. And a cover or a case for this thing would probably be a good idea too. I was at the AT&T store yesterday (for reasons I’ll explain shortly) and checking out the accessories. The supply was pretty limited, but I could pickup a totally clunky plastic case for around $30 and a much sexier leather case for $40, which would probably be my choice. Since when did accessories get so f’ing expensive? Thanks a lot iPod. And the Bluetooth headset will run you $100 after tax. Which is actually cheaper than the original guaranteed-brain-tumor-looking-things people are wearing now, that retail for around $150 (at least that was the price the only time I ever checked about a year ago). The car charger is another $40 or so, which means I’m going to be in for nearly a G Note by the time this iPhone and I are properly setup. Yowza, I’d better go sell a few more websites.

Especially because my monthly plan will run me around $130. I actually haven’t done the math yet because I’m scared to know how much it is. But I picked up 1350 minutes, and I’ll be using most of those as my cell is the primary number for my web design biz. At least I can write this off.

Wrapping up the other minor functionalities, the Notes are pretty cool and the Calculator is whatever. I guess it’s nice to have a calculator on hand, but I haven’t used it yet. The Notes were mostly for typing practice, but I found myself leaving a note for myself yesterday, so that was cool. Although, a voice recorder or “Note to self” type of app would be waaay better. I mean, why not? I can talk into this thing, surely you can figure out a voice recorder. My old e317 had one of those for crying out loud.

What I usually did on my old phone was call my office, which forwards to my cell after 2 rings, and leave myself a message on my own voicemail. I tried this yesterday for the first time and received a busy signal once the call forwarded. WTF? Come on! It seems like my iPhone world is falling apart at every turn. Did I just have totally unrealistic expectations? I don’t think so. It amazes me how perfect some of the features are and how much others are lacking, or missing altogether. Who knows, maybe some important person at Apple will read this and see a gold mine of first-hand user feedback, and actually make some improvements in the next software update.

The Settings are all pretty straightforward, so I won’t go into any detail here.

I purposely saved Maps for last, because it has become the bane of my iPhone’s existence. And the reason is that it has so much potential. In fact, when it works, it’s brilliant. The key words there are when it works, which sounds kinda crazy when talking about an Apple product, no? I mean, that’s what Apple is known for: totally reliable, never buggy products. I say this being a long time Windows user and a recent (1.5 years) iPod user and (0.5 years) MacBook Pro owner. Both of these products are amazing and have barely ever let me down. When was the last time you said that about any technological device? Exactly. So, am I crazy to expect that the iPhone, especially with all the hype, was going to be any less perfect? I don’t think I’m crazy. Well, I did just pay $1300 for 2 phones… (which reminds me, I wasn’t able to sell my second phone on Craigslist, and didn’t bother putting it up on eBay with the others. I received a few emails from the Craigslist community, mostly for trade like a laptop or some gaming system, and a couple of scams, money order type stuff. I returned it to the Apple store on Weds the 11 th, 2 days before the deadline.)

As I was saying, Maps is frickin perfect when it works. But a few days ago, as I was playing with a map and getting driving directions to Northshore golf course (and country club?) the iPhone closed the map and brought me back Home. Hmmm, that was weird, I wonder why it did that? Probably just moved my finger funny or something. I reloaded the Map, had to redo my search parameters, and started reviewing my directions again. Boom, back to Home within 10 seconds of Map playing. OK, what the hell was that? I test software all the time when checking my websites, and this seemed like a bug right off the bat.

Much to my dismay, this little bug kept popping up each time I tried to use the Map. Bull SHIT! Maybe the iPhone was just having a bad day, I told myself as I scribbled down directions on a piece of paper, the old fashioned way. (Usability note: did anyone at Apple actually try to drive while getting directions from their iPhone? Talk about an accident waiting to happen. The directions are way to small to view safely while driving. The interface should change to “On Road” or something, and show you the info you need in huge text: R – Broadway – 2.1 meaning turn right on Broadway, and follow for 2.1 miles, of course. I hope that they’ll fix this in the next update, otherwise, I’m going to have to pull over each time I need to check the next turn…)

Well, I wish I could say that my iPhone corrected this little Home reset bug on its own, but I’d be lying if I said that it did. In fact, it just kept getting worse. It became a reliable experience that every time I’d bring up a map and start moving around or looking for directions or traffic, I’d get booted back to Home within 20 seconds or so. Total BS.

This bug even showed itself in my browser a few times, totally pissing me off. At first, I thought it may have to do with my internet connection, or lack thereof, but usually a stupid message would popup stating “EDGE network totally sucks, or can’t be found” or something like that, which makes me think that it wasn’t a connectivity thing.

Talk about strike 4. This was the most frustrating of them all because I had no way of predicting when it would happen next, and made for some very nervous browsing and mapping. It felt like the Apple bus had just dropped me off at Disappointment Central and the corner of You Just Got the Shaft street. I could hear Steve Jobs laughing in my imagination, with an image of him sipping a Pina Colada on the beach, wearing his black turtleneck.

And somehow, it got worse. (My iPhone experience, not my image of Steve Jobs!) I was getting to know a new friend, and we were talking about hitting up the Rush concert this weekend. I had already programmed his number into my iPhone last week, but wanted to confirm that he was in there. No worries, I even showed him how easy it was to do this. But… where was his contact info? No where to be found. Hmmm. I could’ve swore that I put him in there last week. Oh well, let’s do it again, it’s still kind of fun to enter a new contact.

And I could even get his picture in there this time. Which I did, and was going to show him how easy it was to zoom and move his photo, and assign it to his number. But the frickin photo just said “Capturing” for waaay too long, and the little circle of lines kept circulating and I kept waiting. Wow, this is taking a really long time. And it kept on, and finally after a few snide remarks (by me), I tried to cancel the photo and just get back to my Home. No dice. No buttons would work. My iPhone had totally and completely frozen. This is like a bad dream. His picture was showing on my iPhone, with the capturing message overlaid, and nothing I could do would make this go away. There’s not even a power off switch. My only recourse was to say that I’d been having a few issues with this bad boy and it was time to take it back to the shop, which meant back home and into it’s docking station. Hopefully iTunes would be able to right whatever had gone wrong.

Another let down. My buddy’s photo was still frozen onto my iPhone screen and iTunes didn’t recognize “Oh Billy…” (which happens to be my iPhone’s name). I was at a loss. What else could I do, other than huck this thing into a cement wall? I actually considered this for a second, but regained my senses when I realized that this wouldn’t help things out in the long run. I certainly didn’t want my friend’s ghost permanently marking my $650 baby. My only other choice was to do a hard reboot. I’d have to remove the SIM card.

Now, speaking from experience with my old cell phone, removing the SIM was something that I became quite familiar with. In fact, it was practically a daily ritual. Like my morning coffee. Just pop it open, remove the card, blow on it for old school Nintendo karma, slip it back in and you’re good to go in about a minute. Works every time. So, even though I wasn’t happy about having to resort to this desperate last measure with my iPhone, I figured it would work and I’d be on my way.

Well, the little graphic in the manual that points out the SIM location is pretty straightforward. It just says to use an unfolded paperclip and push it into this little hole on top of the iPhone. So, I figured this would be easy. I unfolded a regular paper clip and gently pushed into the little hole. No love. In fact, it seemed that the clip barely even fit into the hole. “Are these some kind of abnormal paperclips?” I asked. I was trying to be careful so as to avoid slipping and making some huge scratch down the back of “Billy” or even worse, ruining the glass face with a permanent scar. No luck at all with the paperclip. I needed to get something thinner.

What else was there? After a quick brainstorm, I realized that my best bet was to use a push pin. I hope that the pointy end doesn’t totally f something up… and here we go. I started by inserting the pin into the hole and it actually fit. Nice. And gave it a fair amount of pressure. Hardly any noticeable effect and no sign of any SIM card removal pending. Hmmm. Maybe I need to pop it out in a certain direction… nope. This little bugger was really in there.

Out of frustration and desperation, I went after the SIM card again, push as hard as I could onto this little pin, and totally forcing it into the hole. To my delight, the SIM card cover started showing signs of being removable, and actually started being displaced from its housing. My Lord, did I ever go after that push pin! I was on the verge of cracking up at how unbelievably difficult this was, and then all at once, the SIM and its little housing popped out and fell onto my desk. I lost it completely and just started laughing my ass off! I felt like Indiana Jones or something, that I had just uncovered a secret that had been hidden for 2000 years. It was totally and completely ridiculous.

The pushpin was totally lodged into its hole, and that’s exactly how I left it when I started writing this story. I wanted to take a picture of this scene to add some eye candy to my story, but I realized that my camera was at my girlfriend’s place, and that the iPhone was my only other digital cammy. Wow, have I become dependent on this thing already? This morning, I realized that my old cell phone had a functional camera on it, and that’s what I used for the photo below.

So, you’re up to speed with my iPhone experience. It’s been quite a ride living it, but this ride started at the climax and has been steadily progressing downward and negatively since then. A wise business friend of mine used to say, “Always under promise and over-deliver.” Not the other way around.

What’s in store for me and my iPhone? Well, I’m about to put the SIM back in, relock the Indiana Jones vault, and see what happens next. I’ll probably have to reinstall the software from iTunes, meaning that I will likely lose all of the data (contacts, photos, settings) that I’ve so much enjoyed setting up over the past 2.5 weeks. Maybe that info will be saved on my SIM card, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

The AT&T store gave me a number to call for support – 800-MYIPHONE, so I’ll probably try that if the Home bug persists. The last thing I want to do it waste my time and drive back to the Apple store, but usually, it helps to have a face-to-face with a tech person for stuff like this.

After all that, it just makes me think, “Why not push back the launch date if your product isn’t ready yet?” I mean, seriously, it’s going to do a lot more damage to your rep if you release a shitty product on time than if you put us off for another month while you are fixing the bugs. And believe me, for a hype like the iPhone received, it will probably even increase the hype. And your users will thank you and respect you for it.

My advice for Apple: keep your eyes on the ball and don’t forget what got you here in the first place. Quality. Craftsmanship. Revolutionary ideas and easy UI. And more than anything, listening to your users. I don’t mind being a beta tester for your fancy new product, but I’d like to know in advance and I’d like to get some sort of compensation for my wasted time, frustration and feedback.

I will likely keep my iPhone and continue to use it, because when it works, it’s flippin amazing.

Thanks for reading my story. Have a nice day!

Matt

Self-proclaimed UI expert and website developer

Updated – 7/18 at 8 PM:

So a few hours ago I put the SIM back in and Billy was back to normal! Maps and browser worked like champs. We’ll see how this long this good behavior lasts… my fingers are crossed.

Updated – 6/10/2008 at 10 PM:

Well here we are nearly 1 year later and all I can say is… my iPhone is DA SHIT! Apple sent out a few updates via iTunes and all of my buggy problems and BS outlined in excruciating detail above has been solved. In fact, the iPhone has some even more amazing features that were added in the updates like triangulator on the map and the ability to add multiple pages to the home screen and IMAP for Gmail. Tons of fun.

I can’t wait for July 11 when the v2 iPhone comes out with G3 capabilities. That is by far my biggest whine after using it for 1 year. The EDGE network is very slow. However, this time I will wait a few weeks and make sure that the word on the street is positive before I risk my own hide as a “beta” tester.

Much love.

Matt