The Wireless Blog

I’ve seen stories that said people camped out in advance to buy one of the new 3G iPhones,  an appropriate image for a device that’s more like a rock star than, well, a mobile phone.

Personally, I’ve never seen the excitement about waiting in long lines. I’ve waited in lines to get gasoline, but that’s been a long time and back then it was because I needed to fuel my car to get to work. That’s beside the point, though, because I won’t be buying an iPhone even if there were no lines.

Why? Because I just don’t buy into all the hype. Hype is for suckers and the people who prey on them. Sure, there are a lot of cool features with the iPhone, almost all connected to the touchscreen. It’s a cool interface and a beautiful screen. But just about everything else turns me off.

I saw an analyst blog recently that said the 3G iPhone means people can leave their laptop at home. I wanted to ask the analyst who wrote the blog to try to write it on his iPhone. I use my laptop most of the time to write. The iPhone doesn’t even have a  keypad, let alone a keyboard. I’ve got a 6-year-old Palm with an attachable keyboard that is more useful as a laptop substitute than an iPhone. The iPhone’s virtual keypad isn’t even as useful as a physical keypad for making phone calls.

Surfing the Web? Yes, the iPhone Safari browser is nice. But using it on an EDGE network makes surfing less than pleasant (so you switch to Wi-Fi if you’re near a hot spot, which isn’t often unless I’m home). The 3G version will make that experience much better, but there are vast swaths of the U.S. that don’t have 3G yet.

What’s more, the iPhone browser doesn’t work for Flash-enabled Web sites, nor does it work well with Java. So there are a lot of my favorite Web sites it won’t work with.

Apple did get around to correcting one of my biggest complaints about the original iPhone – that it was a closed community. The company is finally going to allow third-party applications. But that’s something they should have done more than a year ago when Steve Jobs said they would sell 10 million iPhones in the first year (he’s up to 6 million and counting).

Finally, the iPhone as a phone (and being a phone is its reason for existence) is barely adequate. Battery life and audio quality are only passable, although the reviews of the 3G model say audio has been vastly improved. I’ve heard a number of complaints about the first iPhone’s reception, but maybe 3G helps alleviate those.

Bottom-line, there is no such thing as a perfect phone, even though iPhone-a-holics may differ. Me, I’ll stick to the one I have because it makes good voice calls, I can get my e-mail and read the Web sites I like.