Unlike most technology enthusiasts, I’m rarely ever an early adopter of a new gadget. I try to give the device time to mature and allow time for the manufacturer to work the kinks out. Every once in awhile something will draw my attention and I have to have it right then. However, that doesn’t happen very often.
I was pretty hyped about the iPhone when it was first announced and I was even more hyped after I had a chance to play with one that a friend owned. It was everything you’ve come to expect to come out of Apple. Sleek, sexy and easy to use. I knew that I wanted one but I was unwilling to be an early adopter as my cell phone is one of the few gadgets that I NEED to be able to rely on at all times.
When Apple released the 3GS I finally decided to take the plunge. I knew that the 3G would be a steal once the 3GS was released and I was willing to stay one generation behind because it was a very stable phone. My wife and I purchased two iPhone 3G’s and immediately we fell in love with them.
I’m by no means an Apple fan boy. I appreciate and use some of their products while others will leave me scratching my head. Whether you love or hate Apple they have pushed the boundaries of certain technologies and interfaces and have been very successful in doing so.
I did not enter into this relationship with the iPhone uneducated. I had done my research and was fully aware that to use the phone to suit all of my needs I would have to jailbreak it. There were just too many restrictions in place for my taste. While I understood some of the restrictions there were just as many that did not make sense. This is the nature of the technology beast.
After using the iPhone in its stock configuration for a week or two I applied the jailbreak and ventured into the world of Cydia and *gasp* unofficial applications. I installed a few applications that allowed me to use the phone in a manner that Apple should have included from the very beginning like multitasking.
I installed quite a few great apps that should have been allowed to be distributed through Apple’s App Store. However, for one reason or another they had been rejected and the developers and iPhone hackers found ways of getting these great applications to those who were willing to put in a little leg work.
The honeymoon with the iPhone ended rather abruptly after about 6 months. I started encountering funky errors and weird device hiccups that at first I attributed to running a jailbroken phone. My phone would randomly complain that the device I had connected was not compatible with the iPhone yada yada yada. I would have expected this error had I actually plugged something in.
However, my phone would do this when it was sitting on the table without any intervention on my part. I would also inexplicably lose all cell connectivity in a known good coverage area. It got to be so bad that I would actually have to reboot the phone in order to regain coverage. Sometimes it would take 2 or 3 reboots and a wait time of up to 10 minutes to regain the connection. Couple this with really slow load times (it should not take 10 seconds to load the text messaging screen), random springboard crashes and applications that would simply cease to function, frustrations started to mount.
My wife’s phone was having the same problems as mine so I had her take it into the Apple store for repairs. We were still within the warranty period and had opted to place an Apple Care Protection plan on each phone so I was confident that getting the phone repaired or swapped wouldn’t be an issue.
The guys at the Apple store were great. They replaced my wife’s phone without any issues normally experienced when trying to repair a cell phone. Unfortunately her phone continued to be plagued with the problems we had been experiencing. During all of this Apple was getting ready to release version 4 of the iPhone OS. I hoped that this new release which had quite a few features and bug fixes added to i t would solve our problems.
Alas, it did not. While iOS4 was quite a bit faster then its previous counterparts we still continued to experience problems. The problems coupled with the fact that Apple left the 3g behind for some of the better features of iOS4, like multitasking, finally sealed the fate of our 3gs phones. We started looking at alternative options.
Let me expand on the iOS4 debacle a little bit before I proceed forward with the new phone search. I firmly believe that Apple has planned obsolescence for their iPhone platform. This is rather dismaying as Apple is not only known for the quality of their products but also their longevity. There are plenty of Apple II and original Macintosh machines that I know still fire up and chug along without incident today. Granted they are not as useful in today’s technological playing field. Yet this doesn’t change the fact that they are known for building reliable and solid products.
I’m not expecting Apple, or any other company, to support their products for ever. That is an absurd thought. Technology is a constantly evolving and changing beast and I understand this. I just don’t agree with shunning such a useful feature on a relatively new phone. *Note: I’m use the term new in reference to purchase date not original release date of the platform* Multi-tasking is something that smart phones have been able to do for some time.
Leaving multitasking out in the first place was not Apple’s brightest moment. I also can’t agree that the 3g is/was incapable of multitasking properly due to hardware constraints. The iPhone, pre-random errors and general erratic behavior, was able to multi-task without issue thanks to the jailbreak and a 3rd party app. Windows Mobile and Android based phones with equivalent hardware specs are able to multitask fairly well.
So my phone, barely 1 year past past purchase at this point, has been marked obsolete. Apple could have at least allowed me 2 years after the purchase before they sent the phone out to pasture. I use the 2 year time frame because this is the normal length of a provider contract when you purchase a subsidized phone. Either honor the phone with updates and full feature additions for 2 years past your last date of sale or terminate that generation when your next generation device is released. *Note: I understand that Apple is not the only manufacturer to pull this kind of bullshit. More on this in a bit.*