Image by Gizmodo.

I snapped. Weeks of stress combined with frustrations caused by the iPhone made me take drastic measures. I sold the damned thing and won’t be looking back. I’ve had it with all the crap I had to put up with. Phones shouldn’t be this aggravating!  I also tend to outgrow things fairly quickly. When someone raises your blood pressure, it’s time to move on. Let’s do a post mortem on this disastrous relationship.

Speed

I outgrew the phone. My reflexes got to the point that I had to wait for the menus and applications to do what were suppose to do. It really reminded me of the Windows 95 days of waiting for the hourglass mouse curser, but since the iPhone has no such animation (depending on the application) it made it 1000x more frustrating than it had to be. I hear the 3GS fixed this thanks to the bump in processor speed but I wasn’t about to go paying for that slight bump. A new hardware revision should be out soon enough but I won’t be jumping into the pool of kool aid because…

Apps

The philosophy Apple has decided to do (for the foreseeable future) doesn’t jive with what I want. Apple has decided for whatever reason, technical or philosophical, to not allow applications to run in the background. While the notification system works well with some applications, it doesn’t for everything. Notifications about high scores in a game or new IM’s are fine. But combined, it can get very overwhelming. Thankfully I didn’t have so many pop ups after I disabled Foursquare and Facebook notifications. What this makes painfully clear is that the notification system in use now is a ghetto rig on something that shouldn’t be. Finding an app is also a mess. The app store was so frustrating to use with all the garbage in it, I gave up on it. I relied on the weekly best of lists from various websites to see if anything remotely interesting popped up.

Network

AT&T sucks and you know it. Slow speeds, dropped calls, failed calls and the most annoying thing of all, being dropped from the tower. During the life span of my iPhone, I had maybe 5 or 6 different iPhones and they all had the same issue. I would constantly, randomly be dropped from the tower resulting in a No Signal message at the most inopportune moment. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have your phone interview dropped because AT&T and Apple can’t get their shit together? A year and a half of working with AT&T network engineers, new iPhones, and new SIM cards and they still have no idea why it’s happening much less how to fix it. Fuck you AT&T, I’ve had it up to here with your shit and I am leaving you for good.

Stability

All software crashes. I realize this. But my iPhone just seemed to do so more often than any other tech I’ve had in years. I’ve gone through more iPhones because the OS wasn’t stable than I have gone through Xbox 360′s, and those will die no matter what. Sometimes I feel as if I am in some bizarre world where Microsoft is the new Apple in some respects and vice versa. MS seems to be loosening up on somethings, while continuing to suck at many others (Games for Windows Live anyone?) and Apple seems to be moving into the 1990′s/early-2000′s era of MS Borg like actions. But enough with that tangent. The point is that the iPhone OS for me was unstable, broke for no apparent reason and the apps also had the same issues.

iTunes

iTunes has been the bane of my existence for years. It all started with the first iTunes enabled phone, the dud known as the Motorola L7 (SLVR). As soon as I got rid of my iPhone I uninstalled iTunes, Quicktimes, Safari and Bonjour with a big sense of relief and freedom. No longer do I have to suffer the slow, bloated piece of junk software known as iTunes. No more freezing while syncing. Love it.

The Future

So what now? Well I ordered a HTC made Nexus One. I’m sure it has all sorts of problems, but at least it’s faster than the iPhone 3Gs and allows background apps. I think the biggest thing I am looking forward to is using my phone as I please without having to jailbreak it. Way to kill a good buzz man. Since I take delivery tomorrow, I’m sure I will return with all sorts of impressions and comparisons to the iPhone. Although if you would rather not wait, just head to any other electronics site as they did this when the phone was first released. Also bypassing the entire non-sense of having apps being rejected (Google Voice, Latitude, etc) will be a nice change. Integration of Google Voice will be a godsend. No more having to deal with crappy web apps. Sorry Google. No matter how much HTML5 magic you work, web apps still suck compared to native apps.

To be continued…