Iphone Sucks 2

I've decided the iphone merits it's own series of semi-regular posts. Today's post is about MMS messaging.

MMS (Multi Media Stuff) messages are texts with a picture from someone else's phone. Until 2008 when everyone got iphones, they were pretty popular. Iphones can't send them, nor can they recieve them. Kind of.

When your iphone gets sent a MMS you get a text from whoever sent it that says:

I sent you a multi media message, you can view it online at http://viewmymessage.com
login: kFq4CtFf7q
password: eelsballs

and the iphone, because it's an awesome internet phone will allow you to click on the URL and bring you to the login screen at View My Message .com. Sadly, the impossible to remember login and random words password are back in your text app and didn't make it across. It's an iphone and while "Copy and Paste" is on the apple's to-do list, they were too busy making sure Crash Bandicoot would run well on it for all 10 complete suckers who care.

Now what you do is go back to your text application (or whatever you wanna call it) and you grab a pencil and some paper and you write down the login/pass so you can go BACK to your web browser and type them in.

Pretty awesome effort to put forth for a picture of your friend in a bar.

No copy/paste. Fine. To be perfectly frank, outside of this one instance I don't feel much of a need for it. But it's been a year and a half. AT&T built a website around people not being able to recieve MMS messages. It's obviously an issue, and so I have to wonder, why has no one up in the gilded white halls of Cupertino come up with the simple idea that when an iphone receives a MMS it understands that it's an MMS and enters the login/pass for you? Even better: it downloads the damn picture to a MMS folder in your pictures app.

Over a year now. I can watch youtube videos, shake it to find arbitrary restaurants and get the weather in Saint Tropez, but I can't get pictures of my sister's dog in the pool.

The Iphone Sucks

Funny story, I thought about writing "Steve Job's ideal sexual object is 5 feet 7 inches of high grade plastic with a 1 inch bevel on the sides and a 1 and 1/3 inch hole, bored and polished in the center," and then I thought to myself, "What if that makes Steve Jobs sad?" and almost didn't write it.

Then I remembered that he's a billionaire and will probably get over it.

So yeah, fuck his phone. Fuck my phone. I have one and no i'm not trading it up. Two simple reasons: Visual Voicemail and Google Maps.

Fuck the app store, weather, stocks, even email and web. All that's glitter.

Maps and Voicemail keep me there. I'm dying for anyone to come out with a competitor that can do the seemingly simple tasks of allowing me to easily listen to voicemail, and to show me how to get places.

Everything else however, is just a reminder how Apple wants my money. Even ringtones cost money (I know there's hacks and I use em, it's the principle of it). Apple's getting out of the "buy our shit and break the law" mode and into "buy our shit, then use it to buy more of our shit" model, which I'm sure looks great on paper.

It does erode at least my brand loyalty to them however. Ipods were great. Even the Itunes store was more like a front than an attempt to make money. Not now. Buy the phone, buy some apps, get advertised to on other ones (that's an awesome new feature!)

Oh yeah.

Tactile feedback. That's where the Jobs fucking plastic boards came in. Between the new default mac keyboard (which even after using for months i'm still blowing it on) and the iphone, Jobs is looking to destroy all tactile feedback.

Sure doing the finger swishing is cool, but I can't even use the phone to take a picture as easily as my RAZR would. I can't tell you how many times my thumb was not hitting the button. See also using the calcluator, stopwatch and any other thing where it'd be a totally sweet thing, if only you didn't have to be looking at or prepping your hand to hit the button. I want to feel that I've hit the button, not wait to hear a delayed shutter sound that is inaudible under most urban conditions.