Sour Apples

In the last year you cannot have failed to notice somewhere along the line that there has been much ado about the Apple iPhone. This was a long awaited event (at least, if you were one of the sheep-like idiots who slavishly follow everything Apple do or someone stupid enough to want every gadget no matter how good or bad it is) and Apple, as usual, were not exactly modest about it: Steve Jobs (founder and head of Apple) claimed it would "reinvent" the telecommunications sector.

This immodest claim was based on the company’s previous success in the mp3 player market. The iPod became ubiquitous to the point that almost all mp3 players were called iPods by the lazy and the ignorant (i.e. most media and a not inconsiderable proportion of the general public). Personally, I didn't like them. I put aside my general dislike of Apple products and gave one a go but personally, I found the stupid click wheel thing the most idiotic and unenjoyable user experience I had had for quite some time. Of course, no-one dared criticise it because it was a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes: No one wanted to speak out against it because it was the new cool toy of the alleged intelligensia. Also, iTunes is the most hateful piece of software I've ever encountered: It's riddled with DRM, is huge and tied exclusively to the iTunes store which sells only DRM crippled music. Anyway, one way or another it did revolutionise the mobile music market, if only in the sense that it brought widespread awareness of the availability of players and, truth be told, it did make other manufacturers up their game to produce even better players that they already were (Samsung and Creative being my favourites as their sound engines are, to my mind, far superior to that of the iPod).

Sadly for Jobs and his crew, they didn't really think about this with the iPhone. When the iPod came along, it was entering an emergent market with little competition and certainly none that was well established. With the iPhone, however, they were going up against Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, LG, Sagem, Motorola and Benq Siemens amongst others. These people had been making phones for years and always trying to outdo each other with features, better user interfaces, better looking models and so on. And they had come a long, long way. After all, some of these companies had been making phones for 20 years since the mobile networks started to take off. The only chip Jobs could bring to the gaming table was that it was an Apple. That was all they felt they needed to say in order to imply that their machine would be better than anything else out there which is enormously arrogant and frankly, it's a claim that fell on it's arse.

Sure, it has a touch screen. But other manufacturers beat them to that. OK, it claims that large icons laid out sensibly are the key to simple navigation. Errr...Nokia beat you to that (and Sony Ericsson as that's how they do their menus these days too). Hmm. Well, it plays music. Big deal - I've had music player phones for years and they weren't restricted to the hideously DRM-crippled rubbish available on iTunes like the iPhone is. It's not a particularly small handset either. And to top it off, it was only available on specific networks in expensive tie-up deals.

So far so underwhelming. The iPhone delivered nothing new at all and the reviews more or less reflected this. Obviously, aesthetics is a subjective point. Myself, I don't think it looks all that great, others do - fair enough. But most reviewers found problems like variable call quality, a 3.5mm headphone jack (a good addition as it's annoying not to be able to use my expensive Shure headphone if I'm using a phone as a music source) which is too recessed to accept most headphone connecters (apparently they will sell you an extender but it's another piece to lose and frankly, for the money they charge they should have damn well included it or made it properly in the first place), the gestures used on the touch screen such as tapping and swiping are not consistent between applications which makes it more time consuming to get used to, a major failing in something which markets itself on it's 'intuitive' user interface, and a myriad of other problems. None of these issues are unique to the iPhone by any means, but they all mean that the iPhone is not the revelation that the Apple fan-boys proclaimed it would be with an almost messianic zeal.

But here's the real problem. Apple's dirty little secret (although it's not really all that secret to be honest) is that they are so protectionist about their devices that you cannot do anything to the phone by default. Third party applications are common throughout the mobile phone world but not on the iPhone. In order to use any you must unlock the phone using a hack worked out by a small army of enthusiasts who see it as a personal affront to their liberty to not be able to do what they want with their expensive toy, and rightly so. To put this in context, there are a number of manufacturers making so-called Smart Phones, most of which use Microsoft Windows Mobile Edition as their operating system. This is fully open to third party developers and you can even get the tools to create your own apps for free from Microsoft. Normally, MS are being lambasted for protectionism, anti-competitive behaviour and so on yet they are allowing anyone to add stuff to phones which run their OS and the phone manufacturers are happy about it too. So why on earth won't Apple? Well, I can't answer that but it seems it's not likely to change any time soon as this story shows.

But what really puzzles me is this: If you're so hacked off that every time there's a firmware update for your iPhone you lose your third party apps and potentially turn your expensive toy into a brick then BUY SOMETHING ELSE YOU FUCKING RETARD. Stop being such a sheep and buying iPhones just because you think they're cool. They are riddled with crippleware and you can do nothing to them without Apple's say so, so instead of whining about how your phone has been ruined, go and buy something from a company who don't get pissy when you want to do something to their product.

Bloody fools.