This is my web series. Watch this space for an episode on "hi-phone" ;)
"We put the Ape in Apple"
I don't have an irrational hatred of iPhones or even Apple. I do hate both, but it's based on facts. While hatred is an emotion, it comes from real, factual reasons.
Just to be clear I don't own an iPhone, I have never owned one, and I probably never will but I have researched them several times when I was looking to buy another phone. They never measured up to other phones for features and never could fulfill my requirements.
I have seen iPhones, I have operated them and I know what their appeal is, we'll discuss them along with the issues they come with.
I am quite vocal in dissing iPhones and many times been told by iPhone owners "You can jailbreak it!". So, I will be covering that in this thesis as well.
First of all, if you jailbreak it, it's not covered by warranty. Technically it's still an iPhone but really it's not, not the way Apple intended, so let us say my criticism applies more to out-of-the box iPhones, not a jailbroken one which I'd say is a custom device. The same way, you could root an Android phone and get even more functionality than you already get.
Secondly, the iPhone is known and praised for its ease of use and user-friendliness. Rooting or jailbreaking a phone is a risky, non-user-friendly business. If you have to jailbreak it to make it any use, purpose defeated.
Thirdly, even after jailbreaking most of the problems or lack of features in an iPhone remain unchanged.
I hate it when people compare iPhone with latest model Android phones or come up with terms like iPhone-killer! Even the first model of Android phone, G1, could do things that the latest model of iPhone can't. So no need for a new model, no need to kill it, it's a piece of crap, you don't kill a piece of crap.
Let's look at a list of things that iPhones can't do or won't do. The common theme in all these will be a lack of choice and freedom for the user as you'll see.
Flash -
I'll dispose of the most obvious and popular one first. Flash. iPhones cannot play flash, never have and possibly never will. Poor iPhone owners try to convince you that Flash is on its way out and HTML5 will replace flash in the very near future. While that maybe true I haven't seen this happen yet and until that happens I enjoy Flash on my Android phones while you can't. True story.
I have heard that Apple (Steve Jobs) decided to keep Flash out of iPhone for perormance reasons. May be true. But it would delay things when you open a Flash-rich website, isn't it? Then it's up to the user to make that choice, not the company.
Now you are serving up a fast internet by not loading part of the websites. I call that cheating. The company claims in their advt's that it's not "Watered-down internet". I call that false advertising. I am surprised nobody has taken them to court for that.
Bluetooth -
I was surprised to learn that while iPhone does have a bluetooth radio, it can only connect to bluetooth headphones. ALL of the other functionality of bluetooth is suppressed. Why? I have no idea. But you can't send and receive files over bluetooth, you can't use your phone as remove control to control other devices and you can't use it to exchange information like contact cards.
USB - Even with an Apple cable you cannot use your iPhone as a USB drive and just copy files. No, you always have to use iTunes and you always have to "sync". And you know what's wrong with iTunes? It sucks!
iTunes - I used it the first time (and last) when a friend of mine, idiot as he was, bought an ipod and asked me to put some songs on it as his own computer was back home in India. As soon as I started using it, I was apalled and infuriated by the asinine way it works!
Do you know that you cannot transfer MP3's, you can only sync? Let me take an example, suppose you had 999 songs on your computer. You connected your i-device (iPod or iPhone) and copied them, oh, excuse me, sync'ed them to your portable device.
At a later date, you moved those songs off your hard drive to an external hard drive to make space on your internal hard drive.
Later you bought another song from iTunes online store and want to copy it to your ipod or iPhone. When you connect your device to your computer and sync it, it'll DELETE the 999 songs from your device and copy the 1 new song to it!
Do you see how much fun that'd be?
So what it means for an iPhone or iPod owner is that every time he wants to copy a new song to his collection, he'll have to first gather all his music collection to the computer, all hard drives, all CDs, all MP3s etc. etc.
What if instead of taking a backup your hard drive crashed? I don't know if you'd still be able to re-download the songs you bought from iTunes but I know that any MP3 that were on your computer would be gone forever. But you think, "Oh, thank god, I have them backed up on my ipod."
No, you don't. The next time you connect your ipod to the computer, iTunes will DELETE the songs from your ipod. Stupid, isn't it? And again, the user has NO control over how it works.
Apparently, after you jailbreak it, you can use iPhone as USB drive.
Compatibility - Be it Mac or iPhone or iPad, Apple users always bring this up as a big plus point. "Everything just works!", they are fond of saying. Well, all the devices and their peripherals are made by the same company, for the same device to work in that specific way. I'd be really shocked if they weren't compatible! It's like saying I and my brother are related! Well, d-uh!
Or like saying that my Samsung TV remote works perfectly with my Samsung TV. Well, it was made to work like that!
The flip side of it is that the Apple devices are not extensible. In my Dell laptop I can install a Western Digital hard drive and extend the storage. I'd still be covered for warranty except for that hard drive. But Mac Users must pay a huge premium to Apple for a part replacement when they even can get a part replaced. Most times they have to buy the new version of the item. But we were talking about iPhone.
Adapters - Every lead, every cable, every adapter for iPhone must be either made by Apple or be Apple specific. If I forget my charger home, I can just borrow somoene's mini-USB charger or PC-connector cable. These days so many phones have mini-USB chargers that I'd have a good chance of finding one in the office. iPhone owners must find the proprietary cable. This doesn't change even if you jailbreak the phone.
Camera - There was a time I was looking for a second phone just to use as a pocketable camera with the phone attached. At that time, I looked at iPhone spec's as well. Today I laugh at my misguided attempt! iPhone camera has always been behind time. (At that time I ended up buying a Samsung Pixon12 for the camera. A Non-android phone and my last non-Android phone even though it was great in itself.) That time iPhone had a 3.2MP camera with no flash.
Even in iPhone 4 you get a 5MP camera, when most camera phones have 8MP or better cameras.
What Apple fanbois will tell you though is that it's not megapixels that matter in photo quality, it's the camera sensor. What they would conveniently forget to tell you is that Samsung Galaxy S2 comes with an 8MP camera sensor while the iPhone4 comes with a 5MP sensor.
The Samsung Galaxy S II can take 1080P video but Apple fanbois will try to convince you that it doesn't matter. Having seen both 1080P and 720P let me tell you - it does matter! Open both on your laptop and you'll see for yourself.
New versions - This is my beef with the company for all their products. They release a device with very limited functionality and just as people start buying them they announce another one with some of the missing features added. Like the iPad had no camera but the iPad 2 had one. So, they didn't have the technology to install a camera in iPad, but got one in two months? How come Samsung and other manufaturers had no problem installing a camera in their tablets? And how come Apple call themselves innovators then? What do they innovate - new, flashy ads for their crippled, over-priced devices?
Just to set the record straight, I could do copy-and-paste on my Sony Ericsson non-smartphone phone 2 years before the iphone was launched. But the first iphone had no such capability. But the new version had copy-paste.
I am sure this makes the iPhone buyers feel like idiots when they see the announcement for the next version a week after they buy theirs.
With Android also there are lots and lots of phone with varied capabilities, but they are all very powerful and feature-rich, and the technology is always state-of-the-art not suppressed for marketing reasons.
Battery - iPhone battery life is supposedly great. Nothing compared to SGS2 though. But even with the first Android phone G1 I had the option to replace the battery. iPhone owners try to sell the idea that a replaceable battery is not a big deal, so let me prove why it is.
Extra power for "those" situation - Sometimes you don't have access to a power outlet..for example, I won't say getting stranded on a desert island, but beach trips, long flights, long train journeys, cruises, picnics, day trips...you get the idea. In all those situations and places, an Android owner can simply slap in a spare battery (cheap to buy) while the iPhone owner can only use their run-down device to crack nuts. Actually not, from what I have heard, it's not a very strong device, physically.
Then there's the question of repairs. If the battery dies, as in die forever, any normal phone can have a replacement. For an iPhone you have to send it to Apple and get the whole phone replaced. With a cost of course. I am sure you can guess that replacing a phone will be much more expensive than buying a battery for a tenner and putting it in yourself.
MicroSD card - The internal storage in iPhone is okay, but you never get the option to add an SD card. Again, it might make things easy for Apple, but doesn't help the user. No matter how big the internal storage an additional card slot can always outdo it.
No jailbreaking can fix this hardware limitation.
Form factor - iPhone models right from the beginning have been OK to Ugly. Ugly being iPhone 4 with sharp corners, heavy body and unwieldy feel to it. It pisses me off when people call it a "good-looking" phone. It's not. It's the magic of marketing that makes it look attractive to people.
Jailbreaking can't help that.
Body - Can you believe that this is something the Apple fanbois actaully defend and praise? It's a glass-and-aluminium body. Glass not only adds weight, it makes it fragile as well.
Once again, jailbreaking won't change that.
Screen - At one time 3.5 inch screen was a good screen. But no more. If you doubt me, put your iphone 4 next to my Galaxy S II and play a movie. We'll see who can see more detail. But the retina display was quite good and is still comparable to the current phones. So I'd give it that.
Customization - On my Android phone, I am the king, I have so much control it's scary. On iPhone you can't even control how your application icons will be displayed. My phone desktop is customized for maximum efficiency. On iPhone you can only have your icons as Steve Jobs wants you to.
App Store - The AppStore is another argument that Apple fans try to use in a debate. While on paper it does look much better than Android market, in reality it's not. The Android market beats is on a couple of points.
Just in sheer numbers there are more apps in the AppStore. Granted. But now that the number of Android apps have crossed the 100,000 mark with the growth continuing the difference is losing its significance. In reality so many of the apps are either useless or duplicate on both platforms.
From personal experience I know that a lot of apps on AppStore are paid while their Android cousins are free of cost.
Then comes the question of censorship. You simply cannot install a 3rd party app on the iPhone. On Android you can download and install from anywhere you fancy.
While the censorships is applied under the guise of security and decency, it doesn't just stop adult apps. Anything that Apple or Steve Jobs don't like can be blocked from the iPhone. Like Google apps. You can't have them. why? Because they said so!
After jailbreaking you can get around this.
There are some iphone Apps that are not yet available on Android. But the reverse is true as well. The caveat here is that while the missing iPhone apps may ultimately be developed for Android, the reverse is not true.
Here are some stories about Apple-banned apps that would surprise you:
http://www.iphonehacks.com/iphone_apps_banned_or_removed
http://www.pcworld.com/article/159887/rejected_10_iphone_apps_that_didnt_make_apples_app_store.html
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/08/reasons-to-jailbreak/
http://www.edibleapple.com/a-look-back-at-the-itunes-app-store-part-iii-the-bannings-and-the-rejections/
Apple can ban an app for politicial or commercial reasons, trying to keep their competition out. Case in point, the app Podcaster that provided the user more functionality than the Apple itunes was banned. Same is true for Google Voice.
Problems - There have always been issues with the iphones. "You have to hold it exactly like this or it won't work." was the famous one, but there have been many, many others. Yet, Apple tries to suppress them and does manage to keep them out of the press, trying to maintain the image that everything works.
Lawsuit - In order to keep their market share, Apple doesn't just spend money on marketing, they also try to browbeat anyone else to suppress competition. The latest example is the lawsuit against Samsung for the design of their 10.1 tablet. How many of these are bonafide cases? Probably none.
The Cult - iphone fanbois have their cult. It's not allowed to say anything against Apple or iPhone. If you start pointing out things that are wrong with the iPhone the fanbois start frothing at the mouth and spouting profanities.
Unfortunately, this is becoming true of Android as well. I myself would get red in the face if anybody in my earshot defends Apple. Unless it's a girl.
