What you (probably) didn’t know about the iPhone

You’ve heard about the cons of using an iPhone — no video recording, no cut and paste, short battery life, yada yada. And like you, I also thought, “Hey, I could live with that.” After all, the fundamental thing is that I will have my calendar and productivity apps — to have my “mac in my pocket.”

And I now have an iPhone 3G. Unlocked, of course, because we geeks turn to Smart by default when it comes to 3G. But having Smart’s fast 3G service wasn’t enough to make me happy. Because Apple is known for churning out half-baked products. Sometimes even purposely so. And they leave it up to Steve Jobs to make it sound like the latest thing on the planet.

  1. You will not be able to receive vCards. At least for Nokia phones, which probably make up 90% of the entire Philippine phone population.
  2. The battery life is more pathetic than you think. You will need to charge the iPhone, at the very least, once a day. Cry, you Nokia E series owners, and say goodbye to those good old days of charging your phone twice a week.
  3. You cannot multi-task. You thought you can maintain that Yahoo chat while playing mSudoku? No can do. The only apps that are allowed to run in the background are Apple’s own (e.g., the iPod).

Updated Jan 4, 2009:

  1. Camera quality is bad. Very bad.
  2. You cannot turn off auto-rotate. A big deal if you like surfing while in bed.
  3. SMS and Mail do not have landscape mode. Real smart Apple. Don’t provide a landscape mode on the apps which need it the most.
  4. You will not be able to send or receive MMS. There are apps for the jailbroken iPhone which allows you to send MMS, but receiving them is another matter.
  5. You cannot cut and paste. I didn’t care much about this for the first few weeks. After all, how many times do I need to cut & paste on a phone? But as soon as I really started to use the iPhone, this incapability became a big source of frustration. I hate you, Apple.

So, what else do you think suck about this thing?