About six months ago, I decided to give up my iPhone for an Android phone. I’ve never been a real fan of Apple, the company, although I have somewhat been on the sidelines for Apple, the technology. The iPhone was definitely one of their best products ever, and I bought one when they first emerged. Then I upgraded to the second generation of the phone, which I believe was the 3G or 3GS (I get them confused). One of the things I really liked about the cell phone (my first real smart phone) was its long battery life. There were times when I went several days before recharging it.
One of the problems with the original iPhone was that you had to go through AT&T. That’s another one of those companies that I’ve learned to live to love and hate, sometimes in the same sentence. Their customer service is atrocious, no matter how hard their PR people try to make it seem otherwise. And sometimes dealing with them as a customer can be a freaking nightmare. But when you don’t have to deal with that side of the house, they do what they need to do, and things generally go smoothly. Not exactly a five-star endorsement, but you take what you can get, I guess.
Well, I discovered at one point that I couldn’t block calls on my iPhone no matter what I did. I was getting nonstop calls from telemarketers and bill collectors (most not even for me), and it was becoming really frustrating. So I looked to Apple to see if there was an app to fix this. There’s not. Apple doesn’t like you to block things, and if Steve Jobs doesn’t like something, that’s just the way every customer will experience the customer experience. Also, AT&T sucks in this area, as they couldn’t figure out a way to stop this other than to block a call (each one), to which they would charge me a nominal ($10) price to do so EACH TIME. That wasn’t a solution.
So, I bought a Sprint Samsung Epic phone (after trying out a few crappy Sprint phones). So far, I’ve been massively disappointed in Sprint. I mean MASSIVELY. They drop calls constantly, and they have finally acknowledged that there’s something wrong in Grand Rapids, although they can’t figure out what it is, but they’re not willing to really do anything to make the experience better other than to offer a different phone (on the same crappy service, which is actually the problem).
And the smart phone isn’t really that smart. In so many ways, Android fails. Miserably. I use Touchdown to link my work email, and whenever I have an appointment on my calendar, any change to the at calender appointment adds a brand new apointment (AND) leaves the old one in place, so that even though I’ve changed my appointment, my phone constantly wants to remind me at the old time that there’s an appointment, even if there no longer is one. When you work in a place where people are changing their appointments all of the time, this makes your calendar somewhat useless. Again, failure of miserable proportions.
The other day, my phone stopped working. For no reason. And then the next day, it started working again. No explanation. Meanwhile, two people phoned me and kept getting voicemail, which they left messages. No messages, of course, ever went through because, well, Sprint sucks.
So I contacted AT&T again, trying to figure out if there’s some way to get the new iPhone 4, and it turns out that I’m in my upgrade range now. What I didn’t know, until I asked a few colleagues who had iPhone 4s on both AT&T and Verizon, that the battery life of the iPhone 4 is no better than my crappy Samsung epic. For some reason, Apple made a brand new phone that is worse than the previous version. My 3G goes for days; the iPhone 4 doesn’t go longer than a half of a day, which seems to be the life span (battery wise) of almost all smart phones these days. That’s just crappy.
So, it looks like I may end up staying with my old iPhone 3G because it’s still the best phone on the market. It doesn’t matter that we’re already into an iPhone 4, and probably moving to an iPhone 5. I doubt it’s going to be much better itself. And every Android phone made is massively dysfunctional, yet it’s branded as the “thing to beat Apple”. If that’s the case, then we’re still a few years away from ever getting something decent out on the market that fills the need of the rest of us.
And that sucks.