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.

Learning to love Apple, kinda

OK so I am now the owner of Apple's latest and greatest must have gizmo, the iPhone 4. In fact I have two of the little buggers as I got Mrs Dracunculus one as well.

Now regulars will know that I'm not mad keen on Steve Job's toys (see my comments on the iPad down the page a bit) and Apple fanbois like this one deserve setting on fire, stomping on and then setting on fire again just to be sure. However a couple of weeks ago I was, much to my surprise, given an 8Gb iTouch as a "thank you" gift from my gaffer at work for all the stuff I did in Honkers which was rather nice. Now I liked my little nano iPod and just saw this as a bit of an upgrade but the more I played with it, got it all working with the wi-fi, added a few apps that I actually use including a very nice graphical calculator that does matrices and calculus the more I liked it. So much so that I thought, "this is good, all it needs is to be online all the time, kind of like a phone" and as I was thinking that Orange my mobile provider rang up and said "Hello Mr Dragon, phone upgrade time again, what would you like?" and I said "iPhone please". And then they told me if I hung on for a week I could have the nice shiny new one when it was released.

So the day after all the sad fucks had queued up for hours to get their Apple heroin the nice man from DHL brought me a couple right to my door and I didn't have to queue up for anything. Nor did I have to pay through the nose as they went onto my 30 quid a month package which has 10 hours of calls and as much text messages and internet as I can eat and they only cost me 32 quid a pop, oh and the contract period is 12 months. The advantages of Orange still thinking I'm a business I guess :-)

So what's it like. Well it's rather nice. The screen display is to die for, brilliantly clear with text incredibly crisp. Sure you would not want to read War and Peace on the thing but for a bit of light surfing it's excellent. There was a but of a brown smudge on the bottom left of the screen (which Peter Ibbotson tweeted back at me was the glue curing or the blood of one of the suicide vicitms from the Foxconn factory where they make the phone, something like that) but it seems to have gone now. Its also very quick and smooth and the pinchy, grabby, wave it in the air like you don't care user interface becomes quite natural quite quickly. I didn't seem to have a problem with the signal dissapearing either but then living in the middle of the swamps as I do I barely get a GPRS signal at the best of times so today in town is going to be the true test of that.

The downsides as far as I can tell are just the normal ones you get with any Apple product and the reasons I don't own any Mac type products. First you have to use iTunes which is just about the suckiest piece of software in the Western Spiral Arm and you can do with it only what Steve Fecking Jobs says you can. Want to add words to the spell checker... no, can't do that. Want to set your ringtone to Kraftwerk's "Computer Love" which you have loaded up... no, can't do that either. How about using it as a portable hard drive? Nope, sorry. Want to write your own little app for it... oh do sod off, look buy "iCrap" from the hideously overpriced app store, we know what's best for you, little person.

Now if I could do all those things on my piddly little Sony Ericcson i910 how come I can't on your box Steve?

Still those niggles aside, I do rather like it and it can stay. I'd say get one if you can on a good tariff where you don't have to pay that much and you're due a phone upgrade anyway but if you go and pay 600 odd quid for one you need your bumps read.