Is the Apple iPhone really the worst phone in the world?
The iPhone is a great product, of that there is very little debate. Even I, as an Apple hater, happily admit that the company outdid itself with this smartphone and truly left everyone else in their wake. However, as brilliant and innovative as the iPhone may be, it falls down on one key component – that of making phone calls. In essence, it’s not actually a very good phone.
This isn’t my opinion you understand, it’s the opinion of many iPhone owners who will happily extol the virtues of their shiny new gadget while at the same time deriding the fact it’s actually not very good at the ‘Phone’ part of the iPhone name. CNET has taken all of these criticisms on board and published an omnibus article covering them all. And they’ve wrapped it all up by naming the iPhone as “the worst phone in the world.”
The list of complaints is long.
For starters, the call quality is terrible, with the tiny speaker both being pathetic and needed to be placed in exactly the right position over the ear to make the person on the other end even audible. And the microphone fares no better.
There’s also the mystery of someone ringing you but the iPhone not actually ringing to let you know they have. People can be sent straight through to voicemail without you ever knowing they were trying to get in touch. Assuming you do manage to speak to someone, the call may suddenly and unexpectedly end without warning.
Then there are the complaints that arise because the iPhone does much more than operate as a phone. Holding one up to your ear for any length of time can be uncomfortable, warm, and sweaty thanks to the large touchscreen. And the battery life sucks due to the iPhone being more like a handheld computer than a phone by any traditional measure.
I’m not sure whether the iPhone deserves the title of worst phone in the world but it’s certainly not the best performer when it comes do providing the bread and butter elements of its primary job as a phone. But all the goodness somewhat makes up for this, and it doesn’t seem to have affected its popularity one iota. It’s just a shame Apple hasn’t made any effort in resolving these issues with the product.
Related Posts:
November 4th, 2009
Who gives a shit what you think?
November 4th, 2009
Droid has its weak spots, The big one is polish and simplicity; the Droid just doesn’t have enough. Techies may go nuts over its flexibility, but normal people are in for some floundering. Sometimes the keyboard doesn’t light up when it should. Sometimes the screen image doesn’t rotate when it should. The camera has an LED flash, which helps at close range at night, but the camera itself is balky and slow to focus and fire. You can record videos (at a high 720 by 480 resolution, although they don’t look any sharper) and upload them to YouTube, but you can’t trim the dead air off the ends first.
The Droid doesn’t work outside the United States, as the iPhone does. There’s no iTunes-like auto-synching software. The Droid’s Web browser is good, but slower than the iPhone’s. And you have to zoom in and out by tapping +/- buttons or double-tapping the screen. That is, you can’t control how much to zoom, so you get far less control (and pleasure) than “pinching and spreading” with two fingers on the iPhone and Palm Pre. Ditto with maps and photos. The real bummer, though, is the apps. The Android Market may offer 12,000 of them, but the iPhone store has 100,000 — and over all, they seem to be more useful and imaginative.
There’s not much room for the apps on the Droid, either, apps have to be stored in a 560-megabyte chunk of built-in memory.
November 5th, 2009
Re: Dave’s comment “Who gives a …”
Apparently you do. You came here to read the post, after all.
Re: iPhone as a phone
This is a good thing to mention. As a user of a smartphone that isn’t an iPhone I hear the virtues of the iPhone and the criticisms of AT&T all the time. That includes dropped calls. It ahs generally sounded like the bulk of iPhone issues were actually with AT&T.
I’ve not really heard about the other problems mentioned – speaker placement/volume, phone not ringing, etc. So perhaps the reason this hasn’t affected sales is because people just don’t hear/read about those problems. That the problems are brought up in forums but not in the mainstream tech media.
While c|net’s headline is grandstanding, at least it publicizes problems with the device that the average person doesn’t hear about.
November 5th, 2009
My thinking is pretty much in line with JohnJ. Most of the “phone” related complaints about iPhone would be better directed at AT&T as provider. Many of the same complaints can be found regardless of the brand. Yet, a LOT of the problems with AT&T’s network in the USA are specifically BECAUSE of the iPhone. Their network just can’t keep up with the volume of iPhone usage which has caused ALL users of AT&T’s 3G network to suffer reduced call and data quality.
The other thing to keep in mind is that 99% of the people who DON’T have a problem with their iPhone DON’T go posting about that on tech blogs. So these sorts of compilations are most often the “vocal minority”. If it was REALLY this bad across the board, people would be returning them in droves. And they’re not.