Five reasons I don't miss my 3G iPhone

Eager to get your hands on an iPhone? Natasha Lomas says you may be better off waiting for the kinks to be worked out.

About a month ago I got an email from Apple informing me a loan iPhone 3G was about to be mine for a whole seven days. I say 'about a month' because I can't really remember when this whole iPhone episode occurred. Not because I'm terribly forgetful - or awash with loan phones (I wish). No. It's because I'm just not missing it.

Blasphemous as that may sound - especially to any Mac fanboys out there - it's true.

The iPhone was a dandy piece of hardware alright but, sad to say, its performance did not live up to the slick promise of its exterior. In this instance, Apple surface belied Apple substance as myriad bugs made their presence known.

So here's why I don't miss the iPhone 3G:

1. The browser

Yes it's certainly best in class for surfing the mobile web - but only when it works. During the seven days the iPhone 3G graced my presence I lost count of the number of times the browser quit without warning before I could get to the bottom of an article I was reading. All that pinching to shrink webpages and accelerometer-fuelled reorientation is all very well but fancy is as fancy does, and if it can't go a few hours without crashing it's just not cool.

2. Web reception

While the odd crash may not sound so bad - though crashing became more 'norm' than odd after a week of use - this was made all the worse by problems with the iPhone's 3G reception. This was never reliable. Even when there apparently was a signal it would often simply not work - or else be so slow as to make browsing painful. On one very slow half-hour bus trip, for instance, I managed to load and read two articles from an online newspaper. If I'd had the real paper in my hand I would have been able to read the whole thing by then.

A simple task like logging into webmail meant leaving the phone for 15 minutes - apparently signing in - only for the operation to fail at the end. This was all the more annoying as I temporarily had no internet at home (therefore no wi-fi for the device to fall back on) and being able to rely on the iPhone for web at home would have been great. But it just couldn't deliver.

3. GPS

This also seemed reluctant to work properly. I had previously seen GPS working on a friend's iPhone - albeit occasionally still inexplicably dropping the homing beacon for long periods - yet my loan phone never seemed able to offer that current location pin-point. It just didn't seem to have any kind of handle on where I was. So that was another feature that - for whatever reason - failed to live up to Apple's 'it just works' mantra.

4. Apps

The iPhone App Store has been lauded as a Steve Jobs stroke of genius - and from a revenue-generating point of view it's clearly doing well for Apple. But the experience for users leaves a fair bit to be desired. Prior to download, information is scant so you often have to download the app in order to find out how it works in practice and whether it's worth having.

Many of the free apps at least are junk - probably to be expected (you get what you pay for, after all). But more info and a more descriptive rating system would be useful here to help users filter what's on offer.

Beyond that, however, the bug problems continued. While buggy third party software can't be blamed on Apple - and many of the apps are inevitably buggy - I also stumbled on what appeared to be another bug with the phone itself that caused apps to crash on start-up and lock me out. On several occasions I had to delete and reinstall pretty standard apps - such as Facebook - as they stopped working completely. So not a glowing report here either.

5. The camera

Lastly, the camera is a disappointment. For such a slick piece of mobile hardware - with such a nice screen - it's difficult not to expect more. But the shiny exterior has another undesirable effect: playing with such a flashy gadget, out and about on London public transport at least, you can't help but feel like you're asking to be mugged. This is a problem with Apple's impeccable branding. A device that epitomises desirability is one that may well end up walking off in someone else's pocket. So at the end of the seven days it was only a relief to pack the shiny hardware back off to Apple and get back to using my battered old Sony Ericsson instead. Scratched and chunky it may be but it works - more than can be said, in my experience, of Apple's iPhone.

Since my ill-fated loan Apple has issued a firmware update for the iPhone 3G which purports to include "bug fixes". Exactly which bugs have been tackled it will not say so we can only hope it's covered all the issues I found.

Early adopter? Buyer beware…