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Droid Does and Doesn’t -my Verizon Motorola Droid 2 Review -updated

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The Verizon Motorola Droid 2

Update 2/25/2011

I have ordered an iPhone 4 on Verizon. While I was happy to wait until Droid 2’s contract ran out, I am not with its recent behavior. It has been 5 months since I got it and after about 2 months of regular intensive use, it get gunked up and requires a factory reset and reloading of apps. I refuse to do this as  a regular activity. On my iPod Touch, I have over a hundred applications and keep over a 1000 contacts, and there is no lagging, no freezing as I look up contacts and compose emails. You can only upgrade Android OS by purchasing a new device, and you load apps at your own risk. My job is too important to risk it with a dodgy phone.

UPDATE 2-22-2011

posted to Droid2 User Support Forum

My Droid2 has been a big disappointment. I tried very hard to live with it. Specifically:

It has been lagging and freezing consistently despite reboots which used to solve the problem. Looking up a contact takes 5-10 seconds and then dialing the number by pressing the number takes another 5-10 seconds of waiting.

I have been told to reboot and reload programs one at a time to identify the problem. I have identified the problem. It is the Android operating system and Motorola’s disinterest in upgrading the OS. In fact, to upgrade any Android device, you have to get a new Android device.

The final straw came this weekend when while on call, the phone decided to lock up and not receive calls -very dangerous for a surgeon on call -luckily, people were able to reach me via my land line.

This is not a mission critical device and I’m going back to the safety of an iPhone. I have put a call into our Verizon rep.

I have to say, the people on the forum here have been wonderful, but I don’t have the time and inclination to sit for several hours trouble shooting a device that wants to run like a Windows ME PC.

UPDATE 2-6-2011

I originally wrote this review last fall. Since I wrote it, I have been tweaking and fiddling with the Droid2 and finally feel that it is working well for me. Initially, I used Launcher Pro to turn off Motoblur, but found increasingly that the device was freezing. I have since turned off Launcher Pro and found the initial troubles I had with Motoblur not to be an issue: bad battery life, processes run astray, and lagging. The slowness and freezing still occurs, but it only requires a reboot and this is only necessary every few days if I don’t swap out the batteries. The batteries are now available on Amazon for very cheap -because the Droid 2 batteries are compatible with the original Droid, the batteries are cheap enough to buy a bunch and a separate battery charger. This allows me to keep the Droid 2 always handy and automatically reboots the Droid 2. Battery now goes about 6-8 hours of regular usage. With three extra batteries -I can go several days -the length of a business trip.

The announcement of iPhone on Verizon has me excited, but only for iPhone 5. Truthfully, it will have to be awfully compelling. While the keyboard on Droid 2 could be a lot better -it’s not tactile enough and the top row is tough to hit because there is very little space between it and the screen, Motorola or Verizon appears to have secretly upgraded the OS from launch and it runs better. What really is compelling is many of my iOS apps run on Android and in some instances, the Android versions are better. For example, Huffington Post always crashes on my iPod Touch, but runs smooth as silk on the Droid2. Drop Box and Evernote work very well, where Mobileme only works on my Apple devices.

Cloud computing and cross platform apps make the OS less relevant and hardware has becomes more important as a differentiating factor. Frankly, despite my love of Apple devices, I’m getting a bit of Apple fatigue. Some Steve Jobs weirdness about buttons (he hates) and keyboards on smartphones (he hates) is making Android the underdog.

What doesn’t work well: compared to iOS, the pinch to zoom and pan is crude, the browser is clearly inferior to Safari in terms of readability (Retina Display is not a gimmick), and Flash is a good news/bad news proposition.

The camera -I’m taking more pictures with this camera and find it takes much better pictures than my Samsung NV10 which I use for OR shots of pathology. The only hassle is that the circulating nurse can’t just pick up and take pictures with this which they can easily with the Samsung. For macro to face shots at decent lighting, the camera is good. The iPhone still is a better all around smartphone-camera for landscapes, but I’m graduating to a better camera as soon as the Olympus ZX-1 is released.

My biggest complaint: Verizon’s VZ Navigator app stopped working and I have only Google’s Navigator which still feels raw and beta-ish works.

Updated review: Very functional device which has improved with time -probably due to some update from Motorola or Verizon.

Original Review from November, 2010

After patiently waiting almost a year for iPhone to show up on Verizon, I decided to give into the hype and picked up a Droid 2 smartphone by Motorola. I had been using an HTC Touch Pro 2, which ran Windows Mobile 6.5. Like every prior WinMo device I had owned, it ran great for the first few weeks then began to require reboots in increasing frequency until it finally required a hard reboot which points to a consistency across the Windows product spectrum. Because i am a vascular surgeon for whom the telephone is “mission critical” I decided to turn in the HTC Touch Pro 2 for a Motorola Droid 2.

The Droid 2 comes at a time when Android based smartphones are released almost weekly. This febrile activity among smartphone manufacturers reflects the volatility of this still relatively new market and product category. Everyone hopes that Apple’s early lead out of the gate is just a replay of the mid 1980‘s when Apple owned the personal and educational computer space. There is a pressure among the smartphone makers to be at once cool but at the same time enterprise (corporate) ready.

Hardware -the nuts and bolts

The Droid 2 is a solid, heavy device with a metallic plastic bezel and a slip resistant coating on the back plate. It has a generous, clear screen which responds well to touch. The hardware keyboard slides out with a tactile click, and the keyboard which on last year’s Droid was panned as one of the worst ever has been improved by elimination of the cheesy looking gold plated D-pad for an inverted T arrangement of arrows freeing up space for a 10% enlargement of the keys. The keys are slightly domed for tactile feedback, another improvement as last year’s Droid’s keys were flat. The keys are also backlit.

Despite these improvements, I find the keys to be stiff and difficult to reach on the top row, much like on the Nokia N810. The HTC TP2, despite being handicapped by Windows, did have an excellent keyboard that was a pleasure to use. I don’t see the Droid 2’s keyboard being useful for composing anything longer than an email because of the effort involved in finding and pressing down the keys firmly.

The backplate holds a removable battery which is rated at 1300mAh -more on this later. The battery has to be removed to access the 8gB microSD card that comes with the device. The OS when it was first released required that all the apps were stored on the onboard memory which was limited to 512mB, but now it appears that the apps live freely on a combination of onboard and user exchangeable memory. You can purchase up to a 32gB memory card. The charging is done through a microUSB port, not a miniUSB port. Micro USB is the same kind used for the Kindle and many newer devices. Beats me why this is better than the miniUSB -just more stuff to buy. The charging port is on the side of the device.

The telephone is excellent in sound quality -I’ve never had a bad Motorola telephone call. My wife refuses to give up her Razor even through it is over five years old because it works well, but like all smartphones, the phone function is one among many primary functions built into the device. Motorola, I believe, does emphasize the phone more than other manufacturers for whom the primary purpose of the device varies.

Most people now use their smartphones rather than carry separate cameras. The camera on the iPhone was superb as it was matched for the screen but it was lacking in MACRO capabilities, at least in the 3G version that I own. The Droid 2’s camera is fine for day to day shooting, and more importantly -it shoots MACRO -focusing down to several centimeters. This is critical in my practice as I take pictures of surgical findings and disease frequently. The video camera is touted to take 720p HD video (though not at 1040p). For myself, I don’t particularly care as long as the video looks good on Youtube or my iPhone. The video is sufficiently good enough that I won’t carry my aging (2 year old) Flip camcorder.

Software -the best and the worst and where Android 2.2 fits

Software is the glue that holds this phone together. The best mobile OS I have ever used was the EPOC operating system designed for the Psion series of PDA’s. It had a miniscule footprint yet was powerful and stable. It allowed for true muiltithreaded multitasking and had was so sparing in power consumption that two AA cells would last up to thirty hours. I routinely ran over ten apps simultaneously with no lag or instability -programs that crashed did not bring the whole device down. The word processing module which allowed for cutting and pasting of media and spreadsheet elements took up all of 22k of memory. EPOC lives on as Symbian within Nokia’s devices and is still by reports stable and simple to use.

Compare this to Windows Mobile which through the weight of its parent, squashed EPOC and eventually Palm OS because of the preponderance of support in corporate IT. To this day (Windows Phone 7 has yet to be released), WinMo devices routinely freeze and eat up system memory and resources requiring regular reboots. This is the opposite of mission critical, and was disconcerting for me when the phone would freeze and stop working while on call (I’m a vascular surgeon). The solution offered by Verizon support for these issues was a clean reload/hard reboot of the OS wiping out all the settings and files I had spent some time to make the device usable. Geeks still love this device because with the right skills, WinMo devices can be made to do just about anything, but to do so requires the kind of sweaty patience that most average users just do not have.

The iPhone changed all this because it addressed this question: how can easy, rich, and portable access to the internet change my life? I have read elsewhere that the iPhone should be placed among the stone cutting edge and the wheel among human inventions. While I don’t run so purply passionate about the iPhone, I was among its early adopters and still run my iPhone as a portable computer off of AT&T. I dropped AT&T because it kept dropping calls where I live, in an suburb of Des Moines, and gave no signal in the small towns that I visit for clinic. That said, the iOS that runs iPhone removes the burden of managing the computer from the user. Because the hardware and software is made by the same company, the device has the feel of craftsmanship found in bespoke suits, handmade golf clubs, and Steinway pianos. The same qualities that make iPhone work so well -simplicity, ease of ownership, and subtle but remarkable power manifest through invention rather than brute processor speed, annoys the Geeks to no end. No cut/paste! they yelled -because all prior implementations of selection was derivative of desktop computers with cursors and mice actions that did not translate well onto a touch device, Apple did not roll out cut/paste until it had developed an elegant and I think best way of selecting text. No multiprocessing? the Geeks cried -but because memory and processor resources used to run and maintain multiple open apps drains both battery power and speed, Apple chose not to offer multitasking until it got the right balance of application switching, processor resource allocation, and hardware to where multitasking, though not true multitasking still yet, does not reduce the efficiency and speed of the iPhone 4. On iPhone 3G, two generations removed, mutlitasking is not offered because it would crush the slower processor.

The Android OS, a multithreaded multitasking operating system derived from Linux, on paper offers just as many of the advantages that iOS does and some that iOS doesn’t, but the whole environment is crippled by too many cooks in the kitchen. Each manufacturer tweaks the screen with widgets and skins -this to give their devices some differentiation as they convince the device to work with different button schemes, form factors, screen sizes, and processors. This approach has several consequences.

Battery life -multitasking on Droid 2 crushes the battery life. By peaking in on the running processes I see that there are up to thirty different processes at any given moment that eat up processor cycles and therefore battery life. Android leaves it up to the user to decide what processes to keep running and which ones to stop -happy times for the Geeks, but for the average user, it’s flummoxing to have to decide if some obscurely named subroutine of a program that has been running for three days is critical or nonessential. Why does the end user have to decide this at all? What’s even worse, it is never clear that when you get out of a program, that you have actually quit running it. You just can’t tell easily.

If you don’t figure out how to run Android down to the rebuild-the-engine knowledge level, your battery life will suffer. My experience with iPhone is that with light browsing, some music listening, average email/web surfing, and usual daily load of phone calls, I can get through a normal work day of 8 hours without trouble but would have to recharge on call. I carry a battery pack just for this (the iPa, a scary big battery from China) for being on call. Even so, on a usual day, I never had to worry about battery life.

The Droid 2’s battery life is miserably short -going about 4 hours of light use before going under 50% and getting critically low before the 8 hours of a usual work day. By busily tracking down and quitting errant processes, by turning off wifi, bluetooth, and GPS, I think I do gain some improvement but at the cost of functionality. There is a 2800mAh extended battery available from Seido, but it requires putting a nonmatching cover on the device, giving it a huge hump and making it even heavier. The solution I’ve taken is purchasing 3 more standard batteries (they cost about 7$ on Amazon as of this writing) and a separate battery charger. This should give me a full 24 hours of charge without having to worry about multitasking and without having to Geek out. That said, to make the machine run well, I do anticipate having to reboot it every day to clear the buffers.

Flash -Android 2.2 comes with a Flash player. Flash is a huge point of contention among Geeks. Even among those who don’t like it, they changed their mind after Apple chose not to support it on iOS. The Flash seems to work okay -the advertisements that still use it are animated, and you can watch some Flash content. The problem here is that these banner ad elements are tiny on a cell phone and worthless when blown up. I suspect that running Flash also causes a serious battery drain.

Motorola Widgets, aka Motoblur -In trying to differentiate itself from other manufacturers, Motorola added a set of apps that are continuously running on the screen -social network updates and weather and the like. The contacts shortcuts are very buggy and don’t work well, but otherwise, it’s nice eye candy. This morning, I picked up my phone and the battery was very warm -some app was running the processor so much as to cause it to heat up, and I think it’s the Motorola apps. You can remove all the widgets and leave the screens bare which I’m favoring.

Android Market -Google’s answer to Apple’s App Store is shiny and full of apps which are direct analogs of iOS apps as well as near copies. Such as it is, it’s cluttered and disorganized just the way the Geek’s like it. There is no way to see sample screens or reviews, and every download comes with a warning about what resources and security issues each app will bring. Compared to Apple’s App Store, there is a bit of the Wild West mentality with regard to security. They might as well slap a big sign -Buyer Beware! on the background of the Android Market. That said, getting Apps is far easier than it was on Windows Mobile.

Google Integration/Microsoft Exchange Support- Naturally, this is a given as one of the first things Android asks for is your Gmail address. The Gmail app works okay, but the menus are not consistent across their messaging applications -the buttons are different for Gmail. Geeks won’t mind, but the average user will. Microsoft exchange support is available out of the box and it works okay -the only problem I’ve had is none of the contact images have come over. Also, the contact application takes an extremely long time to bring up contact data -this may be because it’s looking up the contact on the exchange server rather than caching it on the phone. I say this because the contacts lookups work better on Wifi.

Included Software -Most people will be familiar with the included crapware/trialware that comes with PC’s. They are here as well. Who uses Blockbuster to watch movies? Who knew that Blockbuster was still around? I’ve been steadily deleting these. There is a Navigation app which is a turn by turn navigation software offered by Google that is like all of their products in beta release. It’s free, and that warms my heart because the Verizon navigation app costs $10/month. The Google navigation app is not particularly polished, but who’s going to argue with FREE.

Kindle App -You can download a Kindle App that will sync up with your library of Kindle books on Amazon, and it works very nicely on the sharp screen. The only problem is that you would would burn through the battery while reading for a couple of hours. The only thing more annoying than having the battery give out while reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is to not be able to make phone calls while running through an airport.

Medical Software -The only medical app I found was ePocrates. This works like the iPhone app. Medscape is not available, but there are the usual assortment of medical calculators and references (link: http://www.imedicalapps.com/2010/03/free-android-medical-apps/). Because of the battery life issue, I don’t think I will use this phone much in this way except when it’s all that I’m carrying.

Wifi hotspot -For around 30 bucks a month, you can press a button on the Droid 2 to turn it into a personal Wifi hotspot. This burns up battery life, but works well. When I go to one of my rural clinics, I have my medical assistant drive, and I hooked up the HTC Touchpro 2 to an app called Walking Hotspot (40 bucks, available at Handango) so that I could surf with my iPad. This is a nice feature, but seriously handicapped by the meager battery life on Droid 2. It’s best used plugged into a power source.

Notifcations: Notifications are alerts that occur when a message comes in. On the iOS, notifications are a pickle because they beep and then pop out a window that pauses whatever it is you are doing and stays there until you decide to press cancel or view. This is not a problem if you were surfing the web, but it’s a downer if you were about to pwn someone on NOVA. Android notifications are wonderful -the bell rings, but rather than stop you in the middle of a game, lets say, it shows up as a mini icon on the top of the screen that you can drag down to view. No one likes the way Apple does notifications, but I’m assuming they’re working on it.

Summary

It doesn’t suck as bad as Windows Mobile 6.5 did. It could be great if they could work harder at integrating all the disparate elements of OS/manufacturer/network provider. If you’ve ever driven a well engineered luxury car, you can appreciate the iPhone’s focus on user experience. The initial limitations put on iOS (most of them resolved except for notifications) and the juried App Store environment reflect Apple’s desire not to cripple the phone with poor speed or battery life. Google takes the opposite tack, leaving it up to the user to define the experience. Unfortunately, for 90% of users, that is meaningless and they end up with a phone tarted up by the phone manufacturers and cellular network providers with crapware (HTC’s Sense and Motorola’s Motoblur) that pay little attention to the consequences like slower speed, poor interaction among programs, and suboptimal battery life as the phones get cluttered up like a hotel room without maid service. I could take the time to eliminate all the Motoblur widgets and to scrupulously police all the processes on the task manager, while rebooting daily, to improve battery life and performance, but I don’t want to. I want to leave my wifi, bluetooth, and GPS radios always on and surf whenever the urge hits me. I really want this to be a portable computer replacement. To go back to the car analogy, there is no balance in the Droid 2. This is a mass market manual shift car that comes with a big engine and a small gas tank. They might as well put flames on the side. Most of the apps available smell of desperate me-tooism. I think that as soon as iPhone becomes available on Verizon, this Droid is gone. In fact, I’ve already ordered a new iPod Touch (with Retina Display and Facetime) to be my regular communicator device, and will keep the Droid along with the three spare batteries I’ve ordered handy as a phone and Wifi hotspot. It probably is the best smartphone on Verizon, but I know there is a better smartphone out there.

UPDATED 11/23/2010

I am still using the Droid 2, but in a very limited way. The device had a serious battery drain issue from running Motoblur, and through the friendly moderators at Motorola’s support site, I was advised to turn off Motoblur by using an app called Launcher Pro. This cuts off Motoblur and returns the device to a sort of pure Android state.

Battery life has improved significantly to where I can go a whole workday.

Disappointments include

  1. Variable performance. On some occasions, looking up contacts is speedy, but usually, it’s unusably slow. For example, in the text messaging app, if I add a contact to send the text to, it may take up to ten seconds if it’s fast, or it just doesn’t at all.
  2. Really bad browsing. The browser works slowly even on a wifi network. If there is Flash, its slows to a crawl. The pinch out to zoom works kinda sorta okay but without the accuracy of iPhone. It’s also so touchy that unlike iphone which guesses your intention with gestures, a pinch to zoom may tap a link on the browser and move you out of the page you were reading. Because it’s slow, it can take forever to get back to the point that you were zooming into.
  3. Photo -the camera works well, but the sharing option crashes frequently. Sharing via email which should be a no brainer is miserable because of incredibly slow contact lookups.
  4. Freezes -using multimedia  -mostly videos and Flash causes the Droid 2 to freeze, requiring a battery removing reboot. This is so Windows Mobile 6.5!

The way I am using this device is primarily as a phone and as an internet access hotspot for my iOS devices. When I am in Wifi at work or home, I prefer looking up contacts via my iPod Touch 4th generation and dialing through Google Voice via GV Mobile + app. Google Voice calls the Droid 2 and then connects me to my intended contact -it’s faster than looking up a contact on the Droid 2. Text messaging as well is much faster via my iPod touch than the Droid 2 because again, contact lookups is so botched up.

The only saving grace is the Wifi hotspot capability, but even here, it’s a pain, because you can’t use Bluetooth and run the hotspot at the same time. If I move to Verizon iPhone (Very Likely when it comes out), I will get a separate Wifi hotspot device on a network with a generous data plan. The only reason I would not do this if Verizon’s iPhone comes too close to the anticipated June 2011 iphone update.

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iOS4 keeps the iPhone 3G relevant

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The arrival of iPhone 4 has overshadowed the arrival of iOS 4. Many of us have held on to our iPhones despite quitting AT&T -this is a testimony to the greatness of the product in that previously, when I changed phones, the phones would be given away or put in a drawer or donated. The iPhone, when disconnected from AT&T, is still a wonderful device -more useful than the iPod Touch because of its great and handy camera. In fact, I call it my iPad Mini.

iOS4 promises multitasking to the iPhone 3GS and the most recent iPod Touch, but alas, not the iPhone 3G. What it does do after a long and convoluted updating process which included a period of time where I thought it was bricked, is make the device even more useful by offering folders which seen above during an App Store update, shows the folder contents with micro icons. When you tap on a folder, its contents show nicely just so:

This degree of intuitive folder behavior is …magical. The other thing that I love about the iOS4 update is the unified mailbox. All your mail accounts are consolidated in the unified box and organized by conversation thread!

The iPhone 3G is two years old, and even though it doesn’t multitask, the upgrades to the user interface and mail are worth it and keeps the device relevant. Even though I carry an HTC Touch Pro2 from Verizon, its days are numbered as I consider an upgrade to Droid X or the holy grail -the Verizon iPhone. The only other piece of technology that stayed in my pocket long after its release and freshness date was the Psion Series 5mx, which I reviewed before. When the Touch Pro2’s days are over, it will go into the dustbin.

BTW, this summer has been very busy, so apologies go out to regular visitors. I promise I will update this blog at least twice a week.

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Windows Mobile 6.5 -too little, too late, but reasonably great

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As someone who has suffered from almost a decade of desperately mediocre Window Mobile devices, it was with a specific reason I chose to switch out of iPhone to Verizon’s HTC TouchPro2 last fall. There is a program called Walking Hotspot which turns any WinMo device into a Wifi hotspot and I felt that it would support my iPhone and future devices like the current iPad the best.

The phone turned out to be a load of turd as far as smartphones go, but I blamed it mostly on Microsoft and not HTC. HTC puts a skin called Sense UI on all of its Android devices and a similar skin called TouchFlo on Windows devices, and I turned it off several days ago after finally just being unable to deal with the screen lags and freezes. Lo and behold, underneath all the TouchFlo cosmetics was the outdated and ugly Windows Mobile 6.1, which ran pretty well on this latest and greatest hardware.

So it was a no brainer for me to try the Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade offered by Verizon. I saw several warnings on blogs that it would slow things terribly, but I sensed that it was the TouchFlo skin and not Windows Mobile. The upgrade went well, and lo and behold, turning off the beautiful TouchFlo skin resulted in a spiffy windows 6.5 smartphone that actually works. The screens snap and the device really does alright with Wifi and Bluetooth, things that it was gasping at before. The browser still sucks compared to Safari on iPhone, but borders on usable to where I no longer use iPhone for email so much.

Which leads me to this conclusion: Microsoft spent a decade missing the opportunity to grab and dominate the smartphone market by creating a horrible interface (6.1 and prior) and then allowing third parties to skin up the phone to copy iPhone without regard to performance or battery life. If 6.5 is any indication, Windows Phone 7 will be a formidable entry to the market, more so than Android which is already confusing because of the plethora of skins, form factors, and OS versions.

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The Agonist

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I have agonized over this for a while, particularly after being on call and dropping 3 consecutive calls that left me awake and irritated. Luckily, they weren’t critical, but the iPhone, which I love, works very poorly in my house with AT&T. There is a nearby cell tower, and I should get 5 bars of coverage but we are behind a hill and as you enter its shadow, the bars go to zero, and in my house, 2-3 bars is a good day. I know never to take calls from the kitchen but rather run outdoors if the call is critical.

Therefore, I am quitting AT&T and moving to Verizon. I used to be a 10 year Sprint veteran, but their coverage is equally poor. AT&T in its greed sets their phones for almost no roaming and so won’t switch towers even though there are GSM towers within site (T-mobile I guess). So to Verizon I go with their miserable top down approach to smart phones.

They apparently were offered the iPhone but did not want to relinquish controll over the apps.

I know I had sworn off WinMo, but fact is that HTC has hacked up WinMo 6.1 to work almost like the iPhone with its “flo”-ing user interface. What I like is the fact that you can tether the phone or even better, download a software that will let you make the phone a WiFi hotspot which is nice for my laptop. The irony will be that my iPhone will still be in my pocket for use to call out via Skype over Wifi -this works very well.

I’ll review the HTC Touch Pro2 as soon as I get my hands on it. It’s screen is larger and has higher pixel density than iPhone and it has a real keyboard. It has Bluetooth 2.1 which should let me pair all kinds of gadgets to it including a stereo headset and my earpieces (Plantronic Pro 950 which I consider incredible for cancelling outside wind noise).

Verizon will have to change a lot of things to get iPhone and may not have it in its DNA to undergo this change. AT&T deserves a bag of poop delivered on its doorstep on fire for its negligence of establishing bulletproof coverage. These phones are mission critical and need to be on and reliable.

AT&T had its chance -I asked the customer service rep for microcell -to set up a local in-house micro cell tower. But this would only be an admission of defeat for AT&T and it has not release what would be an enabling technology.

So I ring AT&T’s doorbell, light that paper bag full of steaming poo, and run down the street!

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12 Things I Hate about iPhone

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snc10194In no particular order, these are the things I hate about iPhone after using for 6 months. I have an iPhone 3G with unlimited maxed out data plan via AT&T. 

  1. Keyboard – The lack of a physical keyboard is particularly hazardous for me. The predictive logic is fine for normal people, but as a physician, shooting a quick email becomes an exercise in Gotcha when medical terms and abbreviations morph into correctly spelled but wrong words. I know this can be turned off, but this causes just as many headaches as leaving it on. Apple wants you to go to an Apple laptop for any heavy keyboard work. 
  2. Battery Life -If you use it only as a phone, it gets through a workday. But if you use it as a smartphone, it barely gets through the day. Forget about an extended day, which is typical for me. This means carrying an external battery, cables, and adapters. I will gladly take some bulk for super long battery life. 
  3. Lack of Memory Expansion -flash memory is now dirt cheap. You can get 16GB SDHC cards for less than twenty bucks. This is mind bending when you look at the micro-SD form factor. There is no reason for the iPhone not to have this except for the fact that Apple does not like hatches and holes and excessive buttons, and it wants you to upgrade when you tire of the lack of memory. 
  4. No Copy/Paste -the lack of copy/paste is a philosophical decision on Apple’s part to avoid programs from contaminating each other via the clipboard. Every program runs by itself and tidily goes off when you turn it off. This fish bowl approach to tasking ensures that no program acts in a malignant fashion either intentionally or unintentionally. It’s Apple’s way of saying, “It’s a phone! Buy a Macbook for the heavy lifting.”
  5. AT&T -Not completely happy with it, but I guess it’s a compromise. If you had to marry someone, but you lived in a village in the mountains in the Balkans and there were only three available women, four if you didn’t mind the one with no teeth, a glass eye, and a goiter, you make the best of it. AT&T is the oldest one of the bunch with large bosoms and behind to match. Sure you fooled around with the youngest one (Sprint), but everybody else did too -her biggest fault was inconsistency and broken promises. The middle sister (Verizon), the prettiest one, was also the most controlling. The way she smacked her other sisters around and barked order about how she wanted things done her way was not appealing. So you settle with AT&T. I find strange things happening with the new 3G network out here in the hinterlands. I’ll get 5 bars and a 3G symbol one moment with clear reception, and I turn my head and I get 1 bar with an E (for the slower data connection), and the phone call goes kaplooey. It happens in my car, in my house, in my office, outside with no obstruction whatsoever -and it is the Great Plains with no significant geographic barriers. But the oldest sister doesn’t care so much of your demands, understands if you fool around with the other two, and when drunk, take a roll with the toothless, one-eyed one with the goiter (T-Mobile)-after all -she’s got you now for at least five years from iPhone launch. 
  6. No Bluetooth Anything -Polaroid recently asked TUAW (link) to post a generalized request to open up iPhone’s bluetooth for its portable photoprinter which works with just about every cheap-ass phone out there except for iPhone. This is a beef I have particularly when combined with complaint number 1 -no Bluetooth keyboards, no stereo bluetooth headphones with microphones, no Bluetooth printing, nada. Zip. Just the earpieces that go missing after a few days.
  7. No Easy Way to Organize Your Screens -Apple happily lets you have as many screens as needed for the Apps you download, but organizing them is a disaster if you have more than one screenful of apps (I have seven). If you do factory reset or something like it, all the apps are jumbled. It would be great if you could do it on iTunes and save these configurations. Or if the home screen gave you a link to your productivity apps, your games, your casual games, your deep strategic games, your games to show off the iphone with, and your games that you play for hours on end. Also your photo apps and music creation apps. 
  8. No Passthrough Internet -this is more AT&T’s fault than Apple’s, but I blame both since they got hitched up. You can with some phones, hook up your cell phone to your laptop and use its wireless internet connection to browse from your laptop. I did it a couple of times with my older Windows Mobile smartphones but it was a dodgy affair involving turning on and turning off various things and digging through control panels and hoping for a connection. It would be so wonderful to just attach the iphone and get it’s 3G connection as a connectivity option with no toggling or hoping. AT&T wants you to buy a separate data modem plan. 
  9. No Video Recording -I know you can jailbreak to get this feature, but I don’t want to jailbreak. I want it now, no excuses.
  10. Contacts choked -I have over 2000 contacts and also more via my Exchange connection to my office’s directory. This makes looking up contacts a frustrating affair as I wait often an interminable amount of time to look up a phone number. Absolutely unacceptable. Also, search is dumbfoundingly linear -you have to type the contact in the order that it was input. Sometimes, if I can’t remember a last name, I’m SOL. 
  11. No wordprocessing, no spreadsheet, no Filemaker database access -this is so basic, and so missing, but also related to all of the above -no keyboard, no multitasking, no copy/paste.
  12. No Flash, No WMV, no non-Apple media formats, No Java -this is cumbersome at best, and criminal at worst. I just don’t get it. Very few people use Quicktime anymore. I get the feeling that with Flash -Apple loses some control over the apps and games. 

This still doesn’t drive me away from iPhone because it really is the best smartphone experience. But I am not married to it, and will runoff with the next gadget that does fulfill my needs. And I got needs.