No, this isn’t a post by Ling about the apples imported from China sold at NTUC. Rather, there’s a little imprint on the back of my Apple iPhone that says “Made in China”. If there was ever a bad omen, this would be it!
In all seriousness though, the 8 GB iPhone I picked up for SGD 798 post W890i trade-in didn’t give me any surprises. Not when the phone has already been reviewed, criticized and praised to death online with its every nuance and capability already exposed. That said, here’s my list of likes and dislikes.
Starting off with dislike because it’s a longer list than likes. I won’t be making reference to the semi-dated hardware specifications (screen resolution, battery life, lousy camera, missing video out of the box) since there’s not much that can be done about those now.
Dumb down out of the box. It’s just strange that the The Apple Faithful is so forgiving towards Apple’s paranoia in locking down and limit what goes into their devices. Must be subliminal mind control at work. If it wasn’t for the thriving mod and development community that’s providing widely available tools to jailbreak the phone, my decision to give the device a try would had been a non-starter. So, an hour after playing around with the device at home to see what the iPhone’s default shipped state was like – just so I can say I gave it a chance – I jailbroke it. The device is essentially half-crippled otherwise.
No alphanumeric keypad to SMS with. No kidding. Every other smartphone or wannabe has an alphanumeric keypad for messaging – except the iPhone. I made so many mistakes using the onscreen QWERTY keyboard trying to compose a simple message that I all but gave up. Ok, so the upcoming OS upgrade will allow QWERTY keyboard in landscape orientation, but for the moment, you have to pay for SMS software to do this. Yuck.
No PC-to-iPhone messaging. So, every message that goes out now has to be on the yucky iPhone keyboard. No more of those uber fast messaging I’ve been doing for the last 3 years on Sony Ericcson phones. There’s the Veency client-server software of course, but it’s mind numbingly clunky. And also that Chinese Panda iPhone PC suite software – which I tried and promptly crashed.
No Bluetooth-syncing. Unbelievably too. I’m not asking to sync movie, music, or large data files. Just Outlook Contacts. And just exasperating that I can’t do that without the USB cable.
No printed manual. OK, so there’s the online manual. But I would have liked a printed version to be included in the box for me to look for the odd instruction I can’t figure out on my own.
$$$ for key applications. Yeah it’s nothing new here, but as many as there’re applications in the iTunes store and Cydia, a good number of the essential ones will still cost you. Bleh.
Ok – enough gripes. Next post I’ll write about stuff that worked for me.:)
Good choice dr. foo :D
ah yo first time i used it, i kept mis-spelling until so pek cek!!!! i wanted to throw it on the floor… LOL but now used to it le. i’d say it’s an expensive ok phone =P
but since i will buy anything shiny that’s made by Apple, i’ve grown to love it =D