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I found the article from iStupid very interesting. As a CEO who has provided iPhones to all of my execs, we have not experienced any of the above mentioned “problems.” We sent an iPhone to my mother-in-law in China, no problems although we turned off data roaming. Can you say “user error” iSupid? See I knew you could.

So you are saying that I better wait until all the bugs are fixed, right?

Where do you live? On the edges of civilization or something?

I live in probably one of the craziest, most difficult geographical areas to maintain
a connection, the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’ve had zero trouble making calls, getting GPS to work, or getting data uplinks to work. Rather, this new iWin phone has proven to be dependable, if not downright amazing.

The phone I used prior was a Verizon RAZR, and it was a piece of crappola that pretty much had a mind of its own. Want to talk limited battery life? Try that sucker for a day.

Hope your iBitter-cakes go away and you relax a bit and start enjoying what amounts to the single most amazing piece of tech to come out in years.

-H

Did you get any sleep last night?
just curious.

Maybe when your phone couldn’t make calls you should have gotten a new one. I’ve had the 3g since the day after it was released, (i’m in NYC) and i’ve never had the problems your talking about, even with GPS (which is supposed to suck being near so many tall buildings)

but then again, i’ve used GPS devices before, i know what to expect from them. Data limits. ahh. You think apple doesn’t want you to use more bandwidth. They could give a fuck. It’s at&t and o2 that freak out that 90% of their bandwidth is taken by a phone that only has 10-20% of the smartphones. Why? Cause the internet experience is fucking terrible on those devices and people can’t stand to use them. (i was one of them)

the only thing i find intelligent about this, is that flaming apple will get you picked up on news sites that normally wouldn’t touch your blog.

you mention nothing about how the battery life compares to other 3g phones with it’s features. It usually beats them. (with a much larger multi touch screen) So what are you comparing it to, when you say anemic? a black and white blackberry? You do understand that neat things consume power, no?

blog reeks of “why can’t this iphone make me toast”

I think you must have had hardware out of a bad batch or something as all of our iPhones connect calls first time everytime, get a GPS signal first time everytime (and far faster than my dedicated Garmin Nuvi 7600) using Optus here in Australia.

I also have found iTunes 7.7.1 caused all the apps on my iPhone to start crashing but downgrading to iTunes 7.7 with iPhone firmware 2.01 has now been rock solid.

Apple does make their Core Location services available to third parties so it sounds like it us the fault of Shozu for not geotagging your photos.

As far as battery life is concerned, it sounds like you haven’t used a 3G smartphone before? Don’t you realize 3G chews the battery and in actual fact as several tests by PC World and others have shown, the iPhone has the longest battery life of just about eddy 3G phone (even better than most phones using the slower EVDO
standard.

I think you must have had an iPhone out of a bad batch as all of our corporate iPhones (and my wife’s privately purchased iPhone) connect first time every time with better call quality than our old WinMo phones on the Optus network here in Australia.

The GPS on the iPhone is also a revelation connecting from cold in seconds versus the minutes it takes my top-of-the-range Garmin Nuvi 760. It sounds like Shozu is at fault for not geo-tagging your photos as Apple provides full 3rd party access to the Core Location services in the SDK.

I agree however that the iPhone 2.0 software does have its share of bugs and straight after upgrading to iTunes 7.7.1 all my 80+ third party apps started crashing on launch. However, downgrading to iTunes 7.7 fixed the problem and installing iPhone firmware 2.01 has also helped with general stability.

Hey, at least the iPhone doesn’t suffer from some of the absolutely brain-dead “features” of my old Windows Mobile smartphones like wiping every application, all user data and preferences every time the stupid phones went flat or suffered a hard reset. And thank goodness the iPhone doesn’t force you thru a stupid click-and-drag tutorial every time that happened as well.

It is true the 3G iPhone is not perfect, but it is still a damn sight better than every other smart phone I have ever used.

-Mart

Well, I don’t think the iFail is a “great” device, particularly as it doesn’t perform as advertised. We all now know the 3G radio chipset and/or radio stack are fundamentally broken — the net is a proverbial dumping ground of tales of woe.

I’m in Australia on the Optus network and have perfect 2G performance — it’s really quite good actually — but 3G is atrocious; appalling download speeds (200-320 Kbps, if I can get them at all) and dropped calls. I actually have 3G turned off most of the time because I want a phone that works, since it’s mission critical to my business.

And yes, the battery life is an absolute joke…except I’m not laughing. My first phone was one of those Motorola bricks, and then a Nokia 101, then 202…so I’ve been around cellular devices for a very long time and given advances in battery technology there is no excuse for it to be as bad as it is.

In the past Apple could get away with product failures like this simply because they didn’t have the mass market penetration with their products. It is great for them that this is changing, however their modus operandi is now exposed to the rigours of the market.

For what it’s worth, I’ve taken to calling mine an iLemon

Umm… you “use” your phone (for things other than phone calls) for more than 2.5 hours a day??? Mate, you are wasting your life….

bloggers. gotta love em. Like it makes any difference if they miss a phone call. All they do all day is adjust the metadata on their itunes songs

Initially I’d have agreed with your article, but the more I use the phone, the better it gets, the battery life has improved markedly over the past month, initially I was lucky to get 24 hours out of it, it’s still improving and I can now get away without charging it for 2-3 days depending on usage.

I don’t use the camera often, I also rarely upload data to the web. I use the phone for calls a lot, it’s also used as my work mobile which I take and receive a lot of calls on.
I listen to the iPod at least three hours a day during the commute to and from work, I spend half an hour or so playing games most days too.

I have a camera, two in fact, I have an SLR that I use when I really want great pictures and a 7MP compact camera that I take with me most of the time. Until battery life and optics can exceed that of my current cameras it’s not something I’d expect a phone to better.

The GPS geo-tagging is available for non-native apps, it works with SmapMyLife and a few other camera applications I tried out.
Video isn’t important to me, I used my last phone for video a grand total of three times in 12 months, I used it for pictures even less.

The lack of MMS is a blessing to me, there is nothing more annoying than receiving a grainy tiny thumbnail of an image from someone, I’d much rather snap and email or upload it to whatever website I choose.

As for the issue with the network, I have about two bars of 3G reception most of the time at home and work, bearing in mind my office is a notorious reception blackspot, that’ not bad. If 3G drops out I’ve never had less than full 2G/EDGE reception. If I’m in the browser when I’m out and about I have been able to pick up a WiFi connection 90% of the time.
Only once have I used EDGE and that was in the middle of a large park with no visible cell towers. That again was the only time I had trouble getting calls to connect and in the middle of a festival I had the same problem with my last phone when so many people are trying to access the network at once in such a confined space.

I see your points, but they’re not something that have bothered me at all.
I find the 3G an incredible device, it does everything I want it to, it has a few minor quibbles granted, but it’s been anything but iFail for me.

The battery life of the iPhone 2.0 is longer than any other 3G smart phone out there. You can manually switch to 2G to make it even longer.

How can you call the battery life anemic if it is the longest in it’s class?

Well, I am quite happy that my experience does not mirror yours. My 3G is working great. No dropped calls in the city where I work. I have issues with cell coverage, but I had these even with my old Sony T610, so I think that it is an issue with Rogers, my carrier here in Canada. GPS has been great, and accurate (I will often fire it up and see how accurate it is while I drive to work).

As for battery life, it is hungry, but all the other 3G units are that I’ve tried. I can say that I get 18 hours of use out of the phone off a single charge (I’ve been busy all day making calls, texting and checking my e-mail, using Epocrates, etc while on call, so I haven’t had time to let it recharge). Overall, this phone is the best thing I’ve bought the last few years and now I can’t think of working without it.

why won’t you post my comment?

it’s truth, and this is supposed to be a “open discussion”

there is also no where to email the author. I hate to tell you this but if you wanna be a “tech news site” you have to be somewhat non bias in your “reporting” (IE comparing a phone to a phone)

there is no discussion on this site.

Haha, the more 3G news I hear, the happier I am I still have a 1G iphone. I agree with some people, maybe you had a bad phone?

@jesse cool down will ya…. Tarek is giving his personal opinion which he is entitled to. No need to make a personal attack on his integrity in return. The fact that you got a machine that worked to your expectancy does not lead to a worldwide satisfaction with the iPhone 3G.

Good piece dude, I can see why you set off the fanboy-flamers!
lol

Nothing like intelligent discussion eh?

Hands up, I’ve never used an iPhone (3G or otherwise), but I did enjoy this piece and it makes me chuckle because… well… IF you had written it without any references whatsoever then yeah, maybe we/they could tear strips off your post (well - is it your post they’re attacking? or the attacks actually against you? Nice huh?) ..but the fact of the matter remains you link out to nearly ten different sources for people that agree with you and the final ‘Buggy’ link is to Twitter Search which yields God knows how many results!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that your commentators have had an enjoyable iPhone 3G experience.
You haven’t… and neither have the rest of the people you link to.

As I said - Nice post… and good that you backed it up with facts/evidence too… just a shame it went un-noticed.

Cheers.

J

@kirk – Thanks for your constructive comment. I’ve been using Mobile Phones for over a decade and commenting on Device technology for over 6 years. I’ve owned both versions of the iPhone as well as the iPod Touch and too many other handsets to list here. “User Error” didn’t come into this and all the problems I mentioned occurred on 2 separate iPhone 3Gs.

I’m glad your iPhone 3G experience was better than mine, really. I just wish my experience had been the same.

@KYJuriusDoctor – Waiting is an option. Apple are very good at pumping out software updates, much better than the competition. As I said at the end of my post, the iPhone 3G is a great device and I wouldn’t say don’t get it, just expect some niggles (just like every mobile I’ve ever used)

@howie weed – Have been using the iPhone in London and Portsmouth, 2 major cities in the UK, certainly not in the middle of nowhere. I feel for you knowing your last phone was a RAZR, perhaps the worst phone ever made and I have no doubt that the iPhone is fantastic when compared to most Motorola devices. And as I said to @kirk, I’m glad your experience has been better, I’m just disappointed my experience hasn’t been as good.

@Martin/Mart – Yes, I hope it is a bad batch. Maybe a batch that came to the UK I’m not sure, Im just sharing my experience. And I’ve been using 3G phones since around 2004 so I think I’m qualified to comment on the battery life of 3G phones, thanks. I’m not sure how many 3G devices were available to PC World for that comparison but here in Europe we have many to compare to.

As for the GPS issue, I’m going on what App developers have been saying. iPhones Email App also strips out EXIF data. I hope it is something the developers have over-looked as Geo-Tagging is something I really wanted to do with the iPhone.

Lastly, out of interest which Smartphones have you used?

@Jesse - Patience, unfortunately our editor wasn’t able to approve comments over the weekend.

As for your comment. I did take my first iPhone back and it was replaced immediately no questions asked. Thing is the new one had the same problems. The person who replaced my phone told me he had seen a lot more returns with the 3G than with the original iPhone due to issues with reception, GOS and battery life. Looking through Apples Forums it lookslike many had the same issues.

As for my “credentials”, refer to what I wrote to @kirk and @Martin, thanks.

@RobC – iLemon, hilarious. Good to see someone with a sense of humour

I feel your pain and as you say so do many others who have commented in various forums online. Hopefully Apple will send out a couple of Software updates to fix most of the issues we’ve been facing.

@kev – Great comment, thanks for stopping by. Yeah the iPhone does grow on you despite it’s flaws

@Al – My comments above should cover you question..

@Chris – Another great comment, thanks for sharing you experience. It’s good to know others have been having a better time than I have been. I’m going to replace the iPhone again today and I’m hoping it’ll be a case of third time lucky

at least the comments are what one would expect :). reality distortion field in full effect.

@al, why don’t you shut up before making statements that are bullsh**? or have you in your head declared iphone to be in it’s own ‘class’ so it’s best in it’s ‘class’…

iphone 3g doesn’t have good battery life, it’s a truth. it’s battery life sucks when compared to 3g phones we have been using for _years_. it’s battery for some weird(profit maximising) reasons is smaller than in 2g iphone.

anyways, theres two things that matter with battery life: active use and standby. We know one can’t use an iphone allday for email, web etc. not even apple claims that. the os on iphone can be “on” for far less time than on n70. neither of them can get even close to 18 hours of _use_ so stop the bulls***. n70 gets days and days of standby.

why n70? because it’s ancient - iphones supposed to be modern high tech.

only good things about iphone are the ui(if you like it, i don’t, for lacking bg and copypaste and such) and that you can hack it to run proper apps.

and lack of basic stuff like j2me(appstore _forbids_ selling vm for them too) and mms is a bonus to the target audience of ijesus. but that’s the modern apple way: sell less featured devices, take customers choice away and tell them that it’s ok because you’re hip. have fun shopping in appstore for your freeware apps for desktop mac in couple of years - maybe by them they learn to do some real security on their products too.

@James Whatley - Thanks for noticing the Twitter links, that’s exactly why I put them in there. tbh I doubt a lot of people actually read the whole article, let alone checked out the references, before commenting.

@Christiano - Could have been a bad phone, am getting a third one this week so time will tell.

@lassi - Thanks for the comments on Battery life, right on the mark!

Um, Lassi,
You do realise don’t you that the N70 has only 3.5hrs of talk time, far lower than the 5hrs 38mins talk time that PC World found the iPhone 3G had in real world tests? The iPhone also has a standby time of 300hrs. Of course this is all the more amazing considering the N70 has a tiny 176 x 208 non-touch screen, 22Mbs of RAM and has no GPS or WiFi compared to the vast 480 x 320 multi-touch screen of the iPhone which does of course also boast GPS and WiFi, 6-axis accelerometers, onboard 3D graphics acceleration, 128MB of RAM, 16GB of storage etc etc.

Any other 3G phones you want to trumpet as having better battery life than the iPhone? In the PC World tests, the iPhone 3G beat 3G smartphones from competing manufacturers such a the Tilt, Palm Treo 750, Palm Centro, Moto Q, HTC Touch Dual, Samsung Ace, Pantech Duo and even beat slower EVDO phones such as the Palm Centro, LG EnV and Samsung Instinct. Only three slower EVDO Blackberrys (Curve, Pearl, 8830) beat it and only by a small percentage.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/148348/article.html

As far as your J2ME comment is concerned, care to list any J2ME apps that hold a candle to the sorts of Apps already available from the App Store? Crappy little java games designed for tiny 176 x 208 size screens aren’t what I’d call terribly compelling.

ps Tarek, my old Windows Mobile phones were an XDA IIs and an O2 Mini. Thankfully, more recent WinMo phones don’t suffer the wipe everything on flat battery “feature”, but how Microsoft could have released a platform with such a terrible flaw kind of puts the relatively minor issues some people have with the iPhone into perspective.

-Mart

@Mart - Oh wow, WinMo phones, don’t even get me started on those!

It’s unfortunate that no Nokia devices were on the PC World test but that’s to be expected as Nokia are huge everywhere but the US. I’m surprised it beat out the HTC Touch Dual though.

I’m just going from personal experience but most of the new generation 3G WinMo, Blackberry and S60 devices I’ve used have held up better than the iPhone 3G with the possible exception of the first gen N95 which was pretty similar (and I’ve used pretty much all of them, it’s what I do).

I have a feeling that my problems with reception might have had an effect on battery life as it would have caused more switching between 3G and Edge/GPRS but from what I’ve heard from a bunch of power-users (In Europe) I’m not the only person to find the battery life of the iPhone 3G problematic.

And as for the N70 - I had one of those for a while when it first hit stores and running it on 3G and using it heavily I never ran out of battery as quickly as the iPhone 3G does. Then again that device is a few years old and didn’t have as much power-hungry tech so i wouldn’t expect the iPhone 3g to compete with it.

@ Tarek Abu-Esber

i did read every twitter site. it’s sad you call them references. They are experiences, and even with someone of your “experience” i would (as the sole IT guy at a advertising agency for over 60 users) I would primarily think user error.

telling me your an expert cause you’ve covered this stuff gets you no cred. You don’t need to be good to have a blog, in fact about 90% of “Tech journalism” is worse than utter trite, it’s an argument against free speech. (a joke)

I love how if someone sticks up for an apple product it’s “the reality distortion field”

also @ the “looking in the apple forums proves my point”?? Is really such a bad excuse for proof that you should be embarassed for saying it. really. That’s what the forums are for, and you have no idea how many idiots put themselves into their own position. In the end, i have iphone users (only 3 right now cause of the apple freaking embargo on them) and myself and my girlfriend to judge by, and have seen NOTHING like you have.

As someone who has actually deployed the iphone (in the enterprise, syncing to a 2003 exchange server) next to blackberry’s for biz, i think i would have already heard from my iphone users if this was such an issue. Haven’t heard from ONE of them with any problems. in fact, it’s been a pleasure:
the iphone is easier to setup, (about 3 lines of text to enter, exchange ready)

I deployed 3 windows mobile phones, 2 moto q’s (second gen) and 1 xv6700. All users refused them after about 2-3 weeks as unusable. All devices were running WinMobile 5 tho. (i personally owned a xv6700, and can honestly say it’s a horrible horrible smartphone, and like you, i owned two of them.)

Comparing Java apps to app store apps is funny.

@Jesse - Sad that I call them references? I’m sorry but most of those experiences come from people who I know personally and who are respected highly in the Mobile Industry.

I have no problem with you thinking this is all down to “user error” as I have no way of persuading you otherwise. And as for my “expertise” as you put it, I have worked in the mobile industry as a Mobile Device and Mobile Web expert for nearly 3 years. Though I’m sure that won’t sway you either.

Finally - the Forums. I mentioned these to show that it’s not just me having these problems and I certainly don’t feel embarrassed point them out.

Simply by linking to those tweets Tarek is REFERRING.
Ergo they become REFERENCES, (Irrespective of the stature of the folk you’re referring to Dude).
Also - surely by emphasising his points with the backing of REAL EXPERIENCES of REAL PEOPLE, Tarek lends credence to his arguments, no?

By all means - point out where that logic fails.

Oh.. and I’m sorry, I’m really can’t resist - in IT for 60yrs?

Wow.

You’d think by now you’d know the difference between “your” and “you’re”…

Ahem.

Could someone *please* give me the official specs of a 3G smartphone that manages more than 5hrs and 38mins 3G talktime and 300hrs of standby of the iPhone 3G?

I think the PC World tests demonstrate there must be something wrong with your particular iPhones or your network coverage or something. It is possible there may be some issue with the Infineon 3G chip when in densely populated areas as some reports suggest.

Considering all of the complaints I’ve read about the N70 battery life and Nokia’s stated 3.5hrs talk time being so much less than PC World’s tests iPhone tests and my own personal iPhone experience here in Australia where I get a whole day of reasonably heavy use - your experience doesn’t sound typical.

Nokia rates their upcoming flagship N96 at half those figures with only 160 mins (2hrs 40 mins) and 200hrs standby even though it has a much smaller 2.8” screen and is almost twice as thick physically. The N95 8GB only does 3.5hrs talktime again only with a small 2.8” screen and twice as thick body. Even the Nokia N81 with an even smaller 2.4” screen, no wifi , a piddling 100MB of onboard storage also gives up the ghost at 3hrs 10mins.

Where are these amazing Nokia 3G phones with battery life far better than the iPhone. I can’t see them.

-Mart

I was saying that’s what forums are for.

@ james - IT for 60 people, obviously not all iphone users. (yay embargo) And in IT for 9 years, thanks for pointing out the grammar.

Just pointing the obvious things out, because when your iphone is working fine, and your normal, you don’t go a post in a forum about it or write a blog, saying it’s not ALL like that, and like i said in my first post, you probably got a bad batch.

I still think tech journalists use sensational pro anti windows mac headlines to garner to news aggregation sites.

also, i came off way to harsh on that last one, sorry.

Re the battery, I’m not really interested in comparing it to other smartphones, I don’t own other smartphones; I would simply like my iPhone to see out the day without needing to be recharged and/or without needing time consuming, manual, power management…. e.g. turning WiFi on/off, 3G on/off, location services on/off, bluetooth on/off, etc.

With that in mind and with a view to being somewhat constructive, it would be great if Apple would include power management services in the next firmware upgrade. Just some sort of simple profile management where I can nominate which wireless services I would like active in a particular situation. I imagine four or five profiles would do the trick: surely it can’t be that hard?

PS to Tarek: experts don’t need to justify their expertise, whether they’re expert or not. That as an opinion writer you’ve managed to receive the response you have to this post says everything that need be said. Keep up the good work.

[...] finally getting my thoughts on the iPhone 3G out into a blog post last week I felt it was finally time to go back to using a Nokia S60 device [...]

Good article. For power-users Symbian phones are superior to the iPhone in almost every way. iPhone is fine for basic internet, music and emailing, and will suit the easily confused. If you demand more from your phone it’s definitely a poor choice.

Kenneth, stop it, you’re killing me! *shakes head*

Yeah, I used to love my old $1000 Symbian-based Sony Ericsson P900 much more than my later WinMo smartphones as a phone and user interface, but I’m afraid Symbian is on very shaky ground at this point in time.

It is not surprising Nokia has panicked and is trying to marry the fragmented and incompatible versions of the Symbian OS together in a circling of the wagons with Apple and soon Google and partners breathing down its neck.

Symbian is suffering not only from the fragmentation in incompatible implementations and carrier-specific extensions within UIQ and S90 but to a terribly rickety OS that Nokia even finds limiting (witness the Nokia 770 and N800 Internet Tablets running Linux not Symbian). The failure of the N-Gage platform has also not helped.

Symbian grew out of the old EPOC OS for the old Psion Pocket Organisers back in 1980 and is showing its age with very difficult development environments and byzantine and fragmented app delivery that is no comparison to Apple’s App Store. In comparison, both Android and the iPhone are based on unix (linux being a unix-clone of course) with all the power, developer familiarity and expandability inherent in those platforms. The iPhone SDK in particular boasts a very powerful IDE with tremendously rich object-oriented frameworks for developing modern video hardware-acelerated rich media apps.

Symbian (and Windows Mobile for that matter) is not scaling well into this brave new world of pocket computers powered by 600MHz mobile processors, 128MB of RAM and 16GB of disk.

In only a couple of months since opening, 2,000 apps are now available from the iPhone App Store and that number is growing daily with developers flocking to a platform that has made instant millionaires out of amateur as well as professional developers. At this rate the 10,000 apps Symbian boasts is looking distinctly shabby for an OS that has been around since 1991.

No, I’m sorry to inform you that Symbian is the lame duck in this particular race.

-Mart

Despite being in its second revision, the iPhone is definitely in its Fisher-Price phase.

We’re back to using our S60 based phones in our firm for now. If and when the iPhone matures in capability, we’ll reconsider it. There are too many clumsy and irrational shortcomings in the name of simplicity that make little sense, particularly for a phone that also bills itself as the ultimate multimedia phone and a mobile computing platform. At this point it still has a long way to go.

Granted, it has a large screen and a great browser. That alone isn’t enough. Unfortunately, most of the apps on the app-store are trash. The touchscreen is not that big a deal to us. We could take it or leave it.

[...] to the iPhone 3G, highlighting the points where the S60 OS excels… After finally getting my thoughts on the iPhone 3G out into a blog post last week I felt it was finally time to go back to using a Nokia S60 device [...]

[...] finally getting my thoughts on the iPhone 3G out into a blog post last week I felt it was finally time to go back to using a Nokia S60 device [...]

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