DavidEduardo said:
It's the best phone I have ever had, and my first cellular was around 1989... I must have had at least 35 or 40 different phones on several simultaneous accounts. Good reception, easy to use, and actually fun.
The iPhone has multiple problems that mean I won't be buying one anytime soon, if ever:
1. Lack of 3G: What? No simultaneous voice and data?
2. SIM activation: WTF. Locking handsets to specific providers was bad enough. This goes beyond anything that has ever been done before. What is the point of even having GSM if you can't swap any SIM into the phone and have it work?
3. Inability to tether: Can't use it with your laptop as a modem...not because Bluetooth doesn't support this, but because APPLE thinks that since it has a full web browser on it, you won't need to. Well I have news for Apple. The browser on the iPhone can't do everything, there are other reasons to use the net other than for browsing (e.g. SSH and streaming audio), and given that the thing has a Bluetooth chip in it already, there's no reason to not have tethering. Not that tethering would be as useful since you can't talk and surf at the same time. Using my current phone, I can listen to streaming audio through a laptop connected to the car radio and talk at the same time. From the freeway. For those times of the day I can't get skywave.
4. No voice dialing: Always a nice feature to have while on the road, it allows you to make calls without taking your eyes off the road. iPhone doesn't have it.
5. No permanent buttons: The touch screen is nice, but sometimes (especially when driving) you just want to be able to navigate the keypad by touch alone. If you're good, you can dial by touch, even without voice dialing. The lack of this ability, combined with (4), makes the iPhone an accident waiting to happen.
6. No visual indicators in standby mode: Okay, so I understand that you can't keep the backlight on all the time because the battery would only last a few hours at most, but instead of turning off the entire screen maybe the backlight could just power down (rather than the whole screen) so you can still see it with enough ambient light. Or, just have a separate, smaller, possibly black and white LCD that indicates critical info such as signal strength. As it is, you can't tell if the phone is on, or off, or ran out of battery power when it's sitting on the table, unless you pick it up and touch the screen or push a button. That's annoying.