Ed₃

Much to the amusement and disdain of a few fellow Linux users and work colleagues, I have an iPhone. I enjoy the phone somewhat, its iPod feature is a bonus and it is much easier to use than my old Blackberry. This is however my first tentative step into the bubbling pool orgy that is the Mac hot tub however and will probably be my last.

I regularly poke fun at devout Mac zealots, the feature arrogance of Apple in general, the almost sheep-like devotion of their followers, however in the case of the iPhone, after having used a friends, I considered the phone worth buying. I still do, however I am far from becoming a Mac Fanboy and do have a few gripes with the product.

There are some features which seem to be deliberately omitted in order to pander to the same DRM obsessed content providers which made iTunes a success in the first place.

Consider Bluetooth file transfer, which my good buddy Benjamin has pointed out in good humour as being possible with Nokia phones from 2002. This is a useful, simple feature present in the simplest of phones, not everyone has email and not everyone wants to use it to send a file to someone sitting a few feet away. It would seem the possibility of peeving record companies and the RIAA, to the detriment of the iTunes store has Apple filling their iPants.

The solution – A lobotomised iPhone.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a perfectly good phone and what it does well, it does very well. The interface in my opinion is a generation ahead of anything else on the market, however it could be a great deal better.

How about a user mountable filesystem, support for proper voice dialing, the ability to create my own applications, support for removable media?

These are all standard features that should be present in the most mediocre of phones, let alone one claiming to the be saviour of all phone-kind.

The fanboys may be happy but the rest of us need something more from Apple, a sign that they’re going to remove their heads from the cosy warmth of their behinds and provide us with a more complete feature set.

I don’t give an iDamn about media, politics, Apple culture or any other excuse for these failings and neither will the larger market in which Apple will need to eventually compete with the iPhone when the hype dies. I’m just looking forward to the generation of iPhone where Apple are done raping their fanboys with spoon fed features and have made the phone what it should have been from the first generation.