Benderoff: iPhone pickiness

September 17, 2007 / Filed under: iPhone, Reviews

I find Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Benderoff's "10 Things I Hate about the iPhone" to be a bit picky and unreasonable:

It froze twice during the first week and several times since. It can be quickly unfrozen, but it's still annoying.

It's running OS X. Correct me if I'm wrong, but are there current mobile devices running XP or Vista? If so, those devices would probably freeze occasionally, too.

The touch screen can be too sensitive. Accidental finger swipes are common when surfing the Web.

Practice makes perfect, my friend. This is just downright picky.

From my wife: "Doesn't Apple realize there are two genders?" Fingernails do not work on the touch screen; only fingertips. She's keeping her BlackBerry.

Fingernails? If this isn't being picky, I don't know what is.

I can't use the iPhone to listen to music in my car, where the stereo has an iPod connector. Likewise, the iPhone won't work as an iPod in the majority of third-party listening devices. Work-arounds are being developed.

The first part is a legitimate argument. The iPhone has a recessed headphone port that only connects with Apple manufactured headphones. Custom accessories have been designed to correct this problem, but it's annoying indeed.

An adapter is needed for third-party headphones in the reconfigured headphone slot. This is especially frustrating if you own nice headphones for your digital music player.

Yeah, this is the same point just made above.

I want more storage. Eight gigabytes is not enough. A movie takes roughly 2 gb of space, for instance.

This complaint is device independent. It has nothing to do with the iPhone itself. And Apple will surely offer larger capacity models in the future.

Where are the games? If the iPod has fun games, why doesn't my iPhone? (Yes, I know third parties are making some.)

Games?? Buy a Nintendo DS if you want portable games.

The camera is average and you can't shoot video -- a feature that's becoming standard even on free camera phones.

Name a mobile device that has an "above average" camera. And the lack of a video recorder is not the end of the world.

The Edge network is painfully slow for the iPhone's fun features, such as the dedicated YouTube channel. Unless you're using the iPhone in a Wi-Fi zone, much of the Web experience is frustrating. Hence, mobile Web use on smart phones that utilize faster 3G networks is superior to the iPhone.

That's AT&T's fault, not the iPhone. Just because the iPhone is perhaps generations ahead of other phones, it doesn't mean it should wait until networks support it. Networks are now rushing to support it, eventually making this a non-issue.

For a phone with a great music player, why can't I use stereo-enabled Bluetooth headphones? Because Apple didn't include a stereo profile for Bluetooth, a big oversight. (There's a Bluetooth profile for an earpiece and it does work well.)

Legitimate, fine. If you must bring up this tiny little point, so be it.

Comments/Mentions

# Kevin M. Keating at 9/17/2007 1:55 pm cst

The space issue is one of the things that annoys me most in iPhone (and now, iPod touch) reviews. Cries of "but a movie is 2 GB!" are just idiotic. First, yeah, let's assume that a two-hour movie is 2GB...this means you can fit 3 entire movies on your phone and still have 2GB left for contacts, calendars (which take up zero space), photos and songs. Now, you're starting to get limited in the number of songs you can cram in (200? My sister doesn't even own that many songs!), but the one very important thing that people miss is the fact that if you try to watch three movies, your iPhone will no longer work; that is, the battery will have died. Which means you'll have to charge it. And why wouldn't you have your computer to sync with? You know, your computer with a lot more than 8GB of space (maybe even an external drive or two). Then detractors usually say something about being on a road trip, at which point I try to imagine them driving along the highway, earbuds firmly (or flimsily) in place, one hand on the wheel and one eye on the just-about-ready-to-flicker-off iPhone. That, or making their friend play chauffeur to a silent passenger as they make their way from coast to coast.

Just because a few techno-geeks have a near-fetishistic urge to carry the entire contents of their external-drive-expanded-and-full-of-pirated-booty PCs on a device that fits in ones pocket and runs for weeks with full-screen video and wi-fi and doubles as a modem doesn't mean that this a)is even really possible yet, b) is anywhere near cost-effective, and c)has any amount of mass-market appeal. Yet. Yet. Yet. We digg readers and Google-freaks tend to forget that the "regular people" have very different wants and needs. Patience could be good. Patience that means resisting the urge to buy something that doesn't suit your particular needs just to be able to say that you own it.

The lack of expandability of the storage is one thing, but show me another cellphone that comes with 8 gigs of space and a battery that works well enough to view/play almost all of it.

And fingernails. Wow.

Straw men abound.

(sorry that was so long)

# Matthom at 9/17/2007 4:46 pm cst

Good points, Kevin. Yeah, I think people underestimate how much room they actually have. 8 GB is more than it seems. I bought the 4 GB model and I have plenty of room, although I only sync what I can fit into a day's journey.