I Hate My iPhone!

First off is the interface.  There are four buttons and a switch controlling volume, power and locking, and the magic center button.  Everything else is done via a touch screen.  These facts are obvious to the world by now.  What the non-iPhone using world may not be aware of is that the touch screen interface is terrible.  Absolutely horrendous.  It is an abomination of epic proportions.  Typing on the iPhone just isn't enjoyable.  The virtual keyboard has tiny buttons.  With no tactile feedback, it's difficult to target fingers and thumbs to where they need to be so words come out ering, err, wrong.  Sure, it tries to correct what you type, but half the time the suggestion is wrong.  If it just had a real keyboard this wouldn't even be an issue as trillions of BlackBerry users, well, other than the Storm, will attest.  The iPhone just isn't designed for text input.  To add insult to injury, the touchscreen requires careful UI design.  For example, in Solebon Solitaire, the Undo button is in the lower right hand corner, exactly where the meaty base of your thumb will certainly reside as you move cards around.  Since the size of the screen is rather constrained, cards are extremely small, requiring the tip of a stylus to move them around, which is impossible with the type of touch interface used on the device.  It requires meat, often meaning careful use of the tips of your fingers.  I only use Solebon as an example, but there are many other instances of this problem in countless other apps.  If you're targeting an area smaller than 7.5mm x 7.5mm, there will be problems.

So the touch input is terrible, that's not the only UI problem.  As Apple knew that the vertically-oriented screen sometimes wouldn't cut it they put in tilt sensors to figure out the orientation of the device which can be used to flip the screen from vertical to horizontal and even to upside down should the app support it.  This brings up another point.  Among Apple's apps, orientation change is applied inconsistently.  Some apps support it, others don't.  Until recently, the SMS app did't support landscape mode, but now it does with a vengence.  Apps will flip from one orientation to another with the slightest hint of going off-axis.  Far too many times I'm responding to a text message or checking an email in bed due to the fact that work pretty much requires it, and  with each use of the mail or SMS app, the screen rotates, and flips, and rotates some more. 

Same goes for the iPod app, where the landscape orientation is agonizingly painful to use and is too easy to slip into even when you have the thing vertically oriented!  For a company that founded sane UI design the designers of the iPod app completely ignored every rule at every step of the way.  The auto-locking feature gets in the way, although that fix is simple enough: disable auto-lock.  Oh wait, if you want battery power to last more than a half hour you'll want to hit the lock button which means you won't be able to get back to the iPod app without pressing the power/lock button or the home button and then sliding the unlock slider across the screen.  If you want to change to a different album or artist, you need to precisely target the "Back" button at the top.  If you use the pad of your thumb you are like to hit the top item in the list rather than the back button.  The fact that Apple thinks this design is so great that they created the iPod Touch and morons actually buy it and enjoy it goes to show that the average man is clearly below average.  If you're used to the wheel-type iPods, that interface required very little thought from the user, which is a good thing while trying to find a decent song while motoring down the interstate.  The touch interface requires too much attention.  Not only that, scrolling through a list is error prone. Sometimes it registers a click rather than touch and drag, but more commonly it registers a touch-and-drag rather than a click, leading to further annoyance.

Some have complained that the phone part of the iPhone is substandard.  While it's not the best in the world, I must say that it is better than tolerable.  Well, at least when it comes to dialing.  For answering phone calls, that's a different matter.  There's no send-to-voicemail feature from the lock screen.  Only slide to answer and whatever undefined function the power/lock button performs, which seems to simply ignore the call.  The interface while unlocked isn't much better.

In my personal experience with the devil phone, the text messaging interface is a disaster.  It's slow, ugly, suffers from the scroll and click issue like any other list-oriented app and with the latest software release now has the annoying "change orientation at random" feature.   The SMS app itself is slow to respond.  Click on a conversation and wait, regardless of the length of that conversation.  Since you are forced to use AT&T in the US, that means you have to suffer with their idiotic email-to-sms gateway.  Each message gets its own long code, rather than Cingular's old method of using a single code.  When a few dozen notifications are generated from something at work I get just as many conversations in the slow SMS app.  Not only that, I have to kill each of the conversations rather than killing off one thread.  Not really an iPhone problem, but it's still there partly due to Apple's decision to make the iPhone an exclusive device.

The home button is another abomination.  For those of us used to every other cellular phone created since the beginning of time itself, there is a "back" button that pops off the current screen or app and takes you to the previous level.  To get back to the main screen, there's a home button.  The iPhone combines this into one single multi-fuzzy-function button.  In apps, be it Apple-provided or third party, it pops back to the menu from which the app was launched, no questions asked. Clicking it while in a menu panel returns you to the home menu, unless you click it again, which brings up the search screen.  A double click of this button will perform some function.  That function can be one of the following limited choices: Home, Search, Phone Favorites, Camera, iPod.  Oh, and you can also set it to always bring up the iPod controls when a song is playing.  Double click from the lock screen always brings up the iPod controls.

Third party apps are tightly controlled.  The only way to get an app to your phone is through the App Store, owned and controlled by Apple.  Your app must be submitted to and approved by Apple against some secret criteria.  While it is nice that they vette each app against at least one criteria: it actually runs without crashing on startup. That's about it as far as usability is concerned. as those who purchased I Am T-Pain can attest.  The screen randomly shuts off.  The phone locks up.  Not fun.  Tens of thousands of useless apps litter the store.  Finding something useful is second only to getting an app into the store on the pain index.

On other platforms, such as the BlackBerry, privileged features that could cause trouble for the phone's owner, such as touching the in-phone addressbook, dialing, mucking with and integrating with the main message store, and such are controlled with a cryptographic signing key issued to the developer.  For the BlackBerry, the cost of the key isn't out of reach for the hobbyist.  It's primary goal is to make writing dangerous apps a minor hassle, but more importantly, traceable to a developer.  Not only that, the key can be revoked, providing further security. With the iPhone, apps can't be revoked.  Then again, they can't really do anything dangerous.  Third party apps can't touch the internal addressbook. They can't touch the calendar.  They can't run in the background.  They can't do much of anything.  Only recently did they add "push notifications" which is handy for certain types of applications, but it's nothing compared to the abilities of other platforms where background apps are as boring as a clean phone.  However, this still doesn't allow a third-party calendar app to alert you when it's time to take your meds.  It doesn't allow a non-official app to sync with some third-party service unless it emulates the only "open" option for mobile syncronization: Microsoft's ActiveSync.

The phone is not expandable.  Want more storeage space?  Sorry, you're stuck with the model you bought.  Upgrading to a higher-capacity phone will cost $300 more than the non-contract price of any other phone available from AT&T.  Seeing as how other smartphones that don't suck cost $350 to $500, the Apple options are insanely priced.  Well, that is until your contract is up or you're eligible for an upgrade, which happens when you're 75% finished with your existing contract.  It just so happens Apple releases a new version of the phone every 18 months, and the phone is available only with a two year contract.  Highly suspicious if you ask me.  Then there's the battery replacement issue: you can't.  If you need the battery replaced you'll have to take it in for a service job.  If it's under warranty, you're set.  If not, you may as well buy a new phone.

I could write more, but that would make me want to throw this piece of crap phone against the wall and I  can't afford a new phone right now.