The iPhone 4. Great "i", shame about the "phone"

Well I've had my Jesus Phone for a couple of weeks now so I've had a chance to properly play with it and use it in the real world.

As a handheld device it's fair to say it pretty much rocks. It's fast, the piddly little keyboard which I thought would be a right nightmare actually works very well. Email and light surfing on 3G are fine and apps are quick to load and run.

However what Apple seem to have forgotten is the primary purpose of a "phone" is to, well, make and receive voice calls and at this I have to say it completely and utterly sucks. Firstly to use the device as a telephone necessitates developing the ability manual dexterity and hand positioning skills of a classical Javanese dancer in order to avoid touching the two bits of antenna in the "apple death grip". Sure you don't have to stand next to someone playing a gamelan when making a call but I can't help thinking thing might help with the hand positioning. Also the whole screen is touch sensitive, which is the point, but Apple seem to have not realised that a person's earlobe works just as well as a finger to hit the mute key during a call. Apparently the iPhone is supposed to have a proximity sensor in it to turn off the screen when it detects your bonce but it seems rather flaky unless you have the phone to your ear in just the right way so we're back to those Javanese dance techniques again... remember to extend that middle finger... here are some people making a call to their bank on their iPhone 4's to pay the gas bill:



The other thing about a mobile phone is that you would expect it to have a reasonable standby and talk time, what with it being a phone and all. Nah, not this phone. I use it as an iPod for about 3 hours a day and I'm lucky that the battery will still be reading above 20% when I get home. I almost feel as though I should be carrying around another phone juts in case I need to make a long phonecall at the end of the day. Unless you know you can definitely hook it up to some external power source at some point during the day you will not be able to make any calls on this fucker after 24 hours.

Oh and for a "it just works" device I've managed to crash mine, twice.

I tell you if I had paid more than 30 quid for this thing I would be absolutely livid.