The straw that broke the camels back #2

Why I gave up on the iphone.  I bought an iphone 3g as a toy to play with as i was curious why people were raving over them. The os was mediocre and not even close to the capability of my nokia device in terms of capability.

• It had no cut and paste which made text handling awkward.  Of course when an update added it a nokia fan did agree that apple had made a better cut and paste than any other mobile device.
• It didn't shoot video.  The camera is capable but it just wasn't there in software.  Annoying.
• Only having a touchscreen made text entry slow and clumsy.  Keyboards allow humans to use muscle memory to aid in typing.
• No memory card slot meant there was no expansion option available.
• The lack of a disk option (available and much used on ipods) meant I couldn't transfer files like I did on nokias.  It was handy to throw media files or iso's onto my phone as I travelled to and from work.
• Battery life was woeful compared to my nokias.  Barely a day compared to 2-3 days with nokias.
• Data management on iphone was woeful.
• Bluetooth was non existent as far as I was concerned.  I couldn't tranfer files/data onto or off of the device with bluetooth.  It didn't handle bluetooth keyboards either.
• As shipped it had no global search.  A limitation of my early nokias as well.  After using a palm in the 90s releasing a device with no global search for local data seems dumb and limited.  Adding notes and been unable to search for them other than manually was very annoying.
• Add on software was terrible and limited. I was used to creating standard docs and xls files as well as txt and html files.  Also writing python scripts and running 8bit emulators was impossible.  Not because the hardware couldn't but because it's not part of apples 'vision'.

Yet I used it as my main phone for nearly a year.  I even had the money put aside to get a iphone 3gs and was 3 days away from picking one up before turning my back on ios.  I switched to it when nokia broke my nokias with the stupid camera click.  My disgust and mistrust of nokia made me give the iphone a second chance despite it's limitations.

• I liked its handling of media.  I pointed itunes at an external drive with media and it shuffled files onto and off the device as i watched them.
• I liked it's friendliness.  Whenever showing people a web page on a mobile device.  If I showed them that same page on a nokia device you had to give them a few words on how to move around the page, what to press and what not to press whereas on the iphone no such instructions were necessary.
• My vodafone mobile data was altered to add a vodafone brand and links to almost all pages whereas my iphone on o2 gave me the page as it was.  There was no way that apple would allow such tampering with data like that.  At least that was my view of the crappiness of vodafone.

What made me give up on ios?  The news that google talk had been held up on the app store.  A service that I had no interest in was been delayed by apple.  It was an indicator that apples control of the app store was going to become an issue that was going to eventually spoil my enjoyment of the device.  It's my device and I should be the final decider of what is run on it.  Apple may think that they are protecting their users but their decisions seem to show that they are protecting their monopoly by preventing alternate software.  You only have to look at the popularity of opera mini on ios to see that people aren't happy with the default browser.

So I spent half the money I had saved for an iphone 3gs on my first android device.  A htc hero that gave me a very nice portable device.  I still use the iphone.  An occasional call and sms plus I use it as a media player.  I uninstalled all the apps I had downloaded as I prefer the android equivalents.  It's a pity as it is still a nice device.  Just ruined for me at least by apples short sightedness.

The straw that broke the camels back

So i bought a nokia e71 in 2008.  On paper it was ideal.  Faster, smaller with more features.  Camera with a flash, FM radio, no more pop port.  Greater than 2gb memory card support.

I found the first problem when i added 300 notes from my old e61i to the e71 notes app.  The global search when started would load all the data it was able to search into memory to speed up the search.  This is ok if there is only a few notes.  When you have 300 or so this took nearly a minute before you could actually make a search.  The old version would start and be instantly be ready to make a search.  There was no way to replace the crap version of the software with the old working version.  It's a smart phone with loads of memory.  Somebody at nokia must have tested the device with lots of data.  Did they not realise that prefetching the data was bad?  It was a disaster on Windows Vista, why would it be better on a mobile os?   Why no option to disable that feature?  Strike 1

I used to leave the search application open to avoid the startup wait.  However if I ejected the card to transfer data which I did a few times a week it would shut down all the apps meaning that the damned search startup was waiting for me the next time I made a search.  It also meant that when I started the music player application it would realise the card had been ejected and automatically search the card in case I had added new music.  There was no way to stop this 3 minute delay.  Strike 2

I hate noise.  If you had me and a ninja living next door to you the ninja would be the noisy neighbour.  I can sneak up on cats.  I hate mandatory camera clicks.  It is a stupid requirement in some countries.  It is a bad law as it makes a low vga quality camera on a camera phone make a click when a high end camera phone shooting 720 high definition video can be silent.  It is security theatre at it's worst.  In Ireland thankfully it is not a requirement.  So when i bought my nokia e71 I had checked in advance to see that I could make it silent.  And it was.  A faint beep when it autofocused.  Annoying but tolerable.  Then in Feb 2009 I updated 3 nokias at the same time.  An e71, an e61i and old n70.  All had been silent and I had carefully read the update notes.  Afterwards they had all gained that stupid camera click noise with no easy way to eliminate it.  €1000 of phones destroyed by nokia.  Strike 3 and I'll never buy nokia again.

My iphone can be silent.  My htc hero could be silent.  My sony xperia x10 mini can be silent.  Why the hell did nokia do this without warning?

Moreover I don't recommend nokia anymore.  I reckon I easily convinced about a dozen people a year to buy nokia.  Not any more.  I provided free tech support to friends and family and now almost none of them have nokia whereas it used to be almost all had nokia.

Dumb move nokia!