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[tech] iPhone grr

Well, I finally made the transition and joined the cult of iPhone. Day One with my 16GB iPhone 3G has not been happy. Not in the least.

The iPhone has repeatedly hung, requiring me to power cycle it to clear application freezes in the telephony application as well as the highly-rated SSH application I downloaded from the app store.

Very often I have to tap a command multiple times before the touchscreen responds, a ludicrous problem to have. It seems dreadfully slow to recognize changes in its orientation, which is supposed to be a feature of this device.

The AT&T network here in my area of Portland is notably inferior to the Sprint network I’ve been on — which may be creating some of the other problems I’m having, if network latency is a factor in application behavior. I can’t even make a call from inside the Safeway near my house unless I approach the very front of the building.

Under most circumstances I would just have taken the damned thing back already. That’s three strikes, right there. But I’ve switched carriers to get this phone. Untangling that will be a mess. And almost literally everyone I know who owns one sings high praises, which makes me wonder if I have a hardware lemon. The multiple screen tapping issue, and the failure to recognize when the phone has been rotated, suggest this.

I’ll live with it a few days and see if some of the bugs shake out, but right now I’d give this thing a C- at best. Which is a shame, because I’ve been a diehard Apple fan since 1985, and I waited a long time to get an iPhone specifically in order to avoid early adopter issues.

Are you an iPhone user? Did you have problems like this out of the box?

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Comments

  • 1. Mike

    October 25th, 2008 at 7:18 pm

    I have times when my 2G iPhone bricks itself - you can’t tell if it’s on or off, as any attempt to power cycle it gives zero feedback. There are times when it doesn’t respond to finger presses, and orientation changes

    If it gets below 20% charge state, then the next full recharge doesn’t hold, and it drops back to a low state within a couple of hours, and another full recharge is required.

    It’s definitely not the sort of phone you can rely on in an emergency.

    Then there’s iTunes, whose library corrupts about once a week and you find some app data (like Notes, shopping lists, …) are not part of the phone’s automatic backup. My struggle du jour is to get it to properly synchronize my ringtones. Instead of adding new ringtones from off my computer, it just adds new copies of the existing ones.

    EPIC FAIL.

  • 2. tetar

    October 25th, 2008 at 7:56 pm

    Keelan’s had one for awhile now and no problems.

  • 3. Mike

    October 27th, 2008 at 5:49 am

    The iTunes library file just reported itself as damaged for the 4th time this month. I told iTunes not to synchronise applications with my iPhone (because that deletes everything on your iPhone) - it still went ahead and did it anyway.

    Had a little peek on various iLounge/iPhones/ietc forums and this seems to be a very very common problem. My patience with this device is ebbing rapidly.

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