I told myself I wasn’t going to do it. I told my friends I wasn’t going to do it. I kept convincing myself that I had a great plan with Sprint and as a customer for almost 10(!) years I was going to keep my wonderful Treo and not make the switch. So much for that, because I finally couldn’t take it any longer and I got the iPhone.

It is in fact the best phone device I’ve ever used. The thing looks beautiful, and its a pleasure to use. The little touches that Apple made (like the way things scroll) are phenomenal. Even though its the best phone I’ve had, there are a few things that are almost deal-breakers. I can’t say I’ll be going back to my Treo but sometimes I wonder if I should.

• No Bcc: in the Mail program? What the hell Apple? I use Bcc often with “business” emails.
• No appointments on the home screen. I really like to have a constant reminder of what appointments I might have in the next 24 hours. There’s really no excuse for not having an option to put these at the top of the screen below the time and signal info. It would take up maybe one row of buttons MAX.
• EDGE sucks.
• Did I mention EDGE sucks? For example: you can’t receive phone calls while the web browser is actively connected. Killing time watching Youtube videos? Better hope a phone call doesn’t come in, it’ll go to voicemail.

Literally these are the only major complaints I have about the iPhone, its THAT GOOD.

The million dollar problem is the lack of 3rd-party apps. To me a phone without a way to ssh is completely useless. If a server goes down, and I can’t fix it from my smartphone…what the hell good is it to me? I’m sure other people have similar needs from 3rd party apps. I know a lot of doctors use their Palms with medicine databases to look things up. As of Thursday the iPhone was hackable to install 3rd party applications. Not only has Apple wiped those apps off our phones with the 1.1.1 update but they’ve closed the door to installing them. Look Apple, we get it you have to protect your AT&T contract. We even get that you want to protect the phone itself from becoming so littered with trash that it doesn’t work well and people blame Apple. First of all there are plenty of ways for you to jail applications so they can’t take over the phone. If I can install shitty little Java games on my generic flip-phone, why can’t I install an application on my phone that runs OSX? But I think most importantly Apple, you need to realize that its the .001%‘ers that are actually going to hack our phones. You don’t have to worry about the masses doing it, because they simply won’t. Locking up the phones is bullshit, Apple.

Apple took a lot of heat over the iPhone price drop. I guess the volume of noise on the web was just too great for them not to acknowledge it and do something. I’m adding my 2c in the hopes that it adds to the volume level with the 3rd party application issue, and we can get Apple to change course.