When I spent a week in Buenos Aires recently, I left my Blackberry behind and just used my iPhone for a week. My conclusion: I don’t like my iPhone 3G and was happy (or should I say, less unhappy) to get back to the U.S. and my Blackberry.

I am not here to sing the praises of the Blackberry; the reason I had to leave it behind is that Verizon said it wouldn’t work in Argentina. This is a model of the Blackberry labeled “World Edition” (otherwise known as 8830). It didn’t work in Peru either, when I went there about 18 months ago. And it didn’t work right away in England when I went there in March this year; it did work after about 45 minutes on the phone with Verizon support. Seems like false (or aspirational) advertising to call something a “World Edition” that doesn’t actually work in the rest of the world.

I come not to damn the Blackberry 8830; instead, my experience with the iPhone confirmed all the issues I had with it as a U.S. smart phone and added the experience that it must have been designed to frustrate anyone actually traveling outside the U.S. with it.

In the U.S., my iPhone basically doesn’t work as promised. The browser, the email program and most of the downloaded apps will pretty reliably crash within a few minutes of use. The email program will crash and the email I was working on will disappear. (And then I have to use the glass keyboard, which just doesn’t cut it for fat fingers, which I have, to retype the message.) I thought this kind of unreliability is what Apple was trying to avoid by delaying the release of the developer tools and apps store.

And then there’s the iTunes Apps Store (or whatever the heck Apple is calling it these days). Apple started out with the brilliant concept of a place to buy music for your iPod called the iTunes Music Store, but they have twisted and bent it out of any recognizable shape in order to sell videos and now iPhone applications in the same place. When I download a “free” app from the iTunes store, it has to go through some kind of unintelligible dance about whether it really is free or not. And then Apple sends me an invoice for $0.00. If I wasn’t a fairly experienced user, I’d be completely befuddled by Apple’s download process. And then some of the apps developers update their apps every couple of weeks, which causes a whole different set of problems — my iPhone tells me I have application updates, then tells me I can’t download them because they are being modified, and then when I can download them, puts me through the same stupid purchase process for free updates and sends me yet another invoices for $0.00! Conclusion: Apple didn’t take the time to redesign the store and now the iTunes stores is a total UI mess and probably an e-commerce mess as well.

Outside the U.S., my iPhone decided that I am a bad user and constantly told me I was doing the wrong thing. We called AT&T to make sure that the iPhone would work in Argentina and they turned international useage on before I left. AT&T sent me an email warning me that if I actually used the iPhone the way it is deigned to be used, I would have a huge bill. When I arrived in Argentina, the iPhone itself told me turn off “Data Roaming” to avoid outrageous charges. Turning off data roaming requires four clicks on the phone: Settings/General/Network/Data Roaming (and means you can’t browse the web or get email). As soon as you turn Data Roaming off, the phone starts telling you (repeatedly, every time you try to do something involving data) that data roaming is turned off so you can’t get any data (even if all you’re doing is reading email that was already downloaded). To turn data roaming back on is another four clicks, and instantly you are warned that you will incur unusual charges. I felt like the iPhone was constantly scolding me — for doing what it was telling me to do! Conclusion: Apple really didn’t think anybody would use the phone while traveling (at least to Argentina) and didn’t bother to include that in the PRD for iPhone 3G, even though it is the second version of the phone and clearly designed primarily for data roaming!

Four days into the trip I got an SMS message AND an email message from AT&T warning me that I had incurred unusually high roaming charges and that I should call AT&T (toll free!) to discuss how to minimize these charges. Remember that we had already called AT&T before I left the country and set the plan for international roaming. Remember that I had been trying to minimize data roaming. Our office manager called AT&T and they changed me to a different plan that was half as expensive and backdated to it the day before I left the country. That reduced my charges from $400 to $200 for the first four days. I can’t wait to see the final bill, now that I’m back. Conclusion: AT&T is a complete mess as a company and cannot get its pricing straightened out for normal people traveling around the world.

Bottom line: I don’t like my iPhone even more than I don’t like my Blackberry World Edition 8830. One of these days, the combination of hardware companies, wireless operators and software and service companies will actually design a fully useable device and service. Won’t life be grand then?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 2:50 am and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.