The hidden horrors of iPhone

The Insider’s been manhandling the iPhone 3G for weeks now, and it hasn’t been a bed of roses. In fact, it’s been a struggle.

Apple’s new handset might look lovely, and on paper its specs are strong enough to stand up to scrutiny, but once you’ve ducked below the glossy veneer there’s an ugly underbelly waiting to be found.

The troubles begin almost as soon as the handset springs into life. Its menus, while lovely, are a constant chore.

Where other smartphones let you effortlessly leap from one application to the next, the iPhone stubbornly refuses to run more than one at a time, meaning repetitive trudges to the home screen whenever you fancy switching.

This single-mindedness is also behind another of the iPhone’s major failings: its lack of copy and paste.

Since applications are kept separate from each other, there’s no way for one to pass information to the next. That’s infuriating when it comes to forwarding text or phone numbers, since you’ll need a genius-grade memory to remember information between app switches. Personally, the Insider now carries a notebook and pen alongside his iPhone. How very high-tech.

Then there’s the iPhone’s inability to understand any media format but Apple’s own. Want to listen to Internet radio? You’re stuck with stations streaming in MOV format, and that’s not many at all. Fancy viewing a webpage with Flash animations or video? Tough luck, the handset baulks at the slightest push towards common web formats.

Add to these quirky annoyances the bugginess of Apple’s initial software, which routinely crashes when pushed by demanding 3rd party apps, and I’m beginning to think I’ve made a poor purchase.

And it’s infuriating. The iPhone overflows with potential. It’s the best-looking phone in the world. Its touchscreen is simply delightful, and the new 3G version packs speedy downloads and the fastest GPS locks we’ve ever seen (less than 15 seconds in some cases).

Of course, our niggling annoyances can (and most likely will) be fixed with software updates in the near future, but when you’re paying top dollar, dealing with stock shortages, and being shoehorned into an 18 month contract with O2, is it too much to ask for Apple to iron out the clunky bugs? I really don’t think so.

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