This is one of those posts that has been tickling the back of my head for sometime and I have essentially avoided it up until now–mostly at the prodding of Tyler. Since I am epically lazy–notice how the bulk of my posts in the past year have been photos? Yeah, I’m to lazy to string letters into words and then into sentences. Complete thoughts? Pffffft–I’ll be presenting this as a list.

Love It

• Voice is a service–unlike my past phones voice on this one is just another part of the service mix.
• Internet scaled for your hand–best mobile browsing experience I have ever had.
• Email whenever, where ever–be it the mail application (which could use some feature love) or the sublimely designed Gmail for iPhones I can quickly retrieve and respond to messages
• No keypad–I love the touch pad and how it learns alternate spellings and will offer them up as you type making the process fast and efficient.
• Wi-Fi–Sure other phones have it but the stumble feature works great.

Hate It

• Crippled bluetooth–Great, I can hook up a headset but no file transfers or even laptop tethering. That sucks, Apple.
• iTunes–Yeah, I know. I bought a something from Captain Product Lockdown and I am bitching about having to use proprietary software but seriously, if Amazon can offer a DLM for their music store why the hell can’t Apple port iTunes to Linux? It is a real cramp in my ass to have my phone decoupled from the rest of my computing existence. As for jail breaking, it is not an option because I cannot afford the remote chance of bricking it as this is my primary tether to my job.
• Rebooting–Like a Windows box, Management and I are finding we need to reboot our phones on a regular basis to keep the touch pad and Safari gremlins at bay. Methinks they need to take a look at memory leaks on the device.
• No multimedia SMS–Seriously. WTF. Almost as stupid as breaking the legs off Bluetooth.

Bottom Line

The shine has worn off and my infatuation has mellowed into affectionate ambivalence. The iPhone has changed how I view cellphones and voice services in general. The device truly is a hand sized computer, allowing you to do many of the things you would on a laptop and it represents a paradigm shift: data is data is data. That said, it doesn’t blend well with a computing life off of either Apple or Windows. The inability to backup the device and sync content to it from my laptop handicaps the device enough that I will be seriously looking at what the Android based handsets will be offering this fall.