Top Five iPhone Gripes

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has a post about the top five iPhone gripes. Part of me is falling under the spell of the “Reality Distortion Field” while another part of my looks at the iPhone and realizes that my Pocket PC phone can already do most of what the iPhone does, in many cases better.

After years of Apple fans bashing Microsoft foul-ups, I’m intrigued to see Apple running into problems with a major release.

I’ve heard many times over the last year since the original iPhone was released that “AT&T will always be the iPhone’s Achilles Heal.” I think I agree with that statement, outside of the iPhone’s own limitations. I’ve been with AT&T for a long time, and to be honest, the only thing that has kept me with them is the fear that no other carrier is any better. My phone signal goes in an out like the tides. No kidding, I can be sitting in the same spot and go from five bars to no signal and back to five bars again several times within a few minutes. Call quality isn’t that great. My wife frequently doesn’t get calls from people, and voice mails will show up suddenly two weeks or more after they were left. We’ve complained about this many times in the last three years, and she’s been through five phones with the exact same problem. The problem seems to have eased the last time they replaced her phone, but it’s still there. Once again, I doubt any other carrier is any better. I hear T-Mobile’s coverage isn’t good, but everybody loves their customer service. I’ve never met anybody who complained about T-mobile’s customer service. Even Consumer Reports reflected this in their phone issue approx October 2007.

One AT&T flaw I expected was overwhelmed activation servers. I can’t tell you how many times I try to log into AT&T to check my minutes or how much data I’ve used, only to find the entire website or even a small portion of it (like data usage) unavailable. For a world class telecommunications company, AT&T really doesn’t impress me.