The iPhone is poorly named. It is not a phone. It is a lot of other things: text device, web bowser, emailer, music player, app money pit. But it is not a phone. And the problem is not ATT, as the Apple propagandists would have you think. The problem is the iPhone. My wife is also on ATT, and her Blackberry does not drop calls, it doesn’t have problems connecting. She had an iPhone for 2 weeks and got rid of it because, imagine this, she wanted to talk on it. The unreliability of voice communication on the iPhione is to the point that I no longer make calls on it if I can help it. Why bother, the call is guaranteed to drop. In an example of technology changing our behavior, I text more, email more, and use a land line if I can. This lack of reliable mobile telephony is so pervasive that there isn’t even any need to apologize any more for the cutoffs. The other person immediately understand what is going on and a conversation restarts as if there had been no interruption.
Perhaps this is really about another transformnation that is happening, the acceptance of technology as a method of degrading experience. MP3s are a far cry from the musicalicity of records, but we trade the quality of experience for the potential of quantity. The web has visual content galore, but it is not the same as a magazine. Now the lack of telephony is abstrating the way we socially interact. I am not sure where this is going, or perhaps this is just spasm of luditism, but I feel like we being conned.
I know I am, supposed to love Apple. They make some great products and I happen to own quite a few of them. The iPhone is a wondrous device, it just isn’t a phone. Which makes me question the iPad. I know it is supposed to save the publishing world, and I hope it does. But without Flash, I don’t see how that is going to happen. Why would I buy something that doesn’t run the software that is necessary to few the vast majority of motion content on the web. Hello, like The New York Times? I don’t get it. If Apple had put a real OS on it, and had felt less threatened by the possibility of non-Apple approved Flash programs, then they would have an extraordinary device. But for now, I don’t get it. Maybe I will once I hold one.
You are 100% correct about the pitfalls of voice communication using the iPhone! I can be on a job with people with 2, 3, even 4 other phone manufactures all on AT&T. Those AT&T subscribers can make calls, I can’t.
There need to be an app to correct this!