Saturday, December 18, 2010

I hate my iPhone

I have a good friend (I know this is weird) with whom I communicate almost strictly through voice mails. He leaves me one, I leave him one, often 4-5 minutes at a time. The other day I had to call back four times to get through one of his messages, because my iPhone kept dropping the calls.

That's when I decided: I hate my iPhone.

As a mini computer, it's great. As a phone, it's terrible. And I don't buy that it's AT&T's bad network. Voice quality is awful too.

When I was at Leo Burnett, they talked about brand believers and brand hostages. With Apple, I'm both.

Since I know Steve Jobs himself reads this blog (he's posted here-see his response to my earlier posts about the iPad), note to Steve: make the iPhone a better phone or I'm going Droid.

12 comments:

Tom Lichtenheld said...

(This is not aimed at Gary, but the whole phenomenon.)
I don't hate my iphone, I hate your iphone. Your iphone being the one you can't put down long enough to look me in the eye and have a real conversation, your iphone you need to fiddle with while driving, eating, walking, cabbing, flying, drinking and probably having sex. Do you even have sex? Probably not because there's not an app for that. Yet. I sound like my great-grandparents railing against them confounded automobiles, but this is insane. I dare you to go without it for a day, to fill the voids while in the presence of another person with aimless smalltalk, to be up-to-date instead of up-to-nanosecond (like it makes a difference), to face a moment of silence so your mind can wander to a place of original thought, identity and ideas. I dare you.

G.D. said...

I agree with you Tom, but I think that kind of behavior extends to all phones, don't you think?

For that matter, the internet itself has given the mass populace a case of A.D.D.

Nancy Pelosi said...

How long do I have to wait for another objective commentary on Sarah Palin? I mean it's been a week.

G.D. said...

Nancy,

She hasn't done/said anything ridiculous yet this week. But it's only Monday.

Richard said...

What would be better - a free internet like we have had, or one controlled by the Federal Government and monitored by bureaucrats for acceptable content? I am guessing you would not be for a free Internet since your smarter than Palin President is implementing federally monitored Internet regulations.

Anonymous said...

Did Obama close Gitmo yet?

Kos said...

I have not been paying much attention to politics except for the Colbert Report. Did Obama and the Democrat Congress and Senate majorities end the evil Bush tax cuts yet? It's been two years so they must be gone with those huge majorities we gave them. Republicans couldn't block these ending of these if they wanted to with the numbers we have. I am sure our man, Obama, smarter than Palin, got this simple task done, didn't he?

Bill C. said...

Can I do another Press Conference with Barry?? I love that guy. He could be President one day.

Patrick Scullin said...

Tom, you're right, and Gary, too. We've all become slaves to technology.

Maybe we'd be smart to get off the smart phones. Just have regular old cell phones, use a computer when you have to.

But we won't. Our reality today is nothing more than time spent in front of a variety of screens, interrupted by human interaction.

Man, I'm bumming myself out here.

Anyway, Merry Christmas.

Steve Jobs said...

Mr Doyle

I think anyone who likes this president should have a Droid.

Anonymous said...

An iPhone is not a really a phone. It connects over phone lines only intermittently but it drops the calls consistently. It will only complete a text message after running an algorithm to determine its importance. More importance = less connecting. After countless hours with the lovely, highly trained obfuscators at Apple and AT&T, the iNotPhone is finally doing what it is supposed to do: not make calls at all, ever. At this, it excels. Thanks, Steve!

Tony Richardson said...

They don't work very well as phones in Australia either.