iPhone = Danger on the Road

I’ve had my iPhone for two months and really have only a few complaints about it except for the most common ones such as lack of a Flash player, no cut-and-paste when replying to an email, and most definitely the battery issue. When my battery goes dead about 14 - 18 months from now I’ll have to part with the phone for at least three days to get it replaced. When it’s finally returned to me it will probably have its memory completely wiped. Why did Apple design the hardware that way?

But here’s the real complaint: YOU CAN’T USE AN IPHONE IN A MOVING VEHICLE! That’s right, there’s no way to answer a call without using two hands, taking your eyes off the road, and making three touches on specific areas of the screen. And that’s with a handsfree device on your ear. Does that make any sense? You can’t call someone either without looking at the addressbook and at least two touches. The phone has no voice dialing feature. The much less expensive RAZR phone I had before this automatically answered the phone when a handsfree device was in use and it also had voice dialing. Driving without a handsfree device is dangerous. With an Apple iPhone driving with one is also dangerous.

The RAZR could also run a number of add-in applications (albeit it with a clunky interface) because it incorporated Java which Apple bans. The RAZR also had another important feature that the iPhone lacks and may never have. When a stored alarm or Datebook event came due the RAZR automatically powered itself on and sounded a loud alarm. Alarms only work on the iPhone when it’s turned on. The sound of an alarm is almost inaudible.

Oh, and there are the Google Maps and YouTube limitations also. Google Maps is only marginally useful because the phone doesn’t have a GPS built-in. The YouTube viewer only lets you see the small subset of a few thousand genuinely uninteresting videos that were specifically reformatted for the iPhone. Most of YouTube’s content is unviewable on an iPhone. I still enjoy the gadget for the few cool features that it has. Out of ten points I give it five. Although I also have a G5 iPod I’m no fan of Apple.

Today’s link:

Darth Apple and the iPhone: The Dark Side Revealed?
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000301.html