Top 10 reasons the iPhone STILL sucks, even after I played with it

So, my buddy let me play with the iPhone Saturday afternoon to see if actually playing with it would sway me. I was really hoping it would.

It didn't.

Without further adieu, here's my NEW list: the "Top 10 reasons the iPhone STILL sucks, even after I played with it".

10. See items 1-10 of my prior list

Yeah, yeah, I know I'm tooting my own horn, but check out my original "Top 10 Reasons the iPhone Sucks". Part 1 is HERE and Part 2 is HERE. I stand by what I said in January. I raised some good points, and it seems like people (ahem, Steve Jobs) agree with me. Let me run down all of those with updates real quick:

- It's Ugly... yup, still ugly.
- It's Bulky... check... still bulky.
- Uses EDGE instead of EVDO... yup, didn't disappoint... very slow network.
- It's expanding the evil Google empire... yup, still doing that, even more now since it's partnered with YouTube.
- It costs too much... yup, still would need a second mortgage to buy it.
- Safari sucks... yup, it even sucked on Windows.
- Short Battery Life... yup, even worse than I thought.
- It's made by Apple... that didn't change.
- It's a GSM phone, and no one in the US uses GSM... yup, still the case, and still a major reason it won't be huge... people don't want to switch from good carriers to Cingular/AT&T.
- This story will make Digg and all the fanboys will come out of the woodwork to defend it.... check and check.

9. You couldn't activate them right away

Too many idiots bought into the argument that this would be the most revolutionary phone ever and bought it. Only problem was that AT&T had their heads even FARTHER up their asses, and they didn't have the capacity to activate all the phones. In fact, it killed their system until Saturday morning.

The irony, of course, is that AT&T thought this thing would bomb worse than I did!!!!!!!!! I at least knew that the morons of the world would unite and buy this stupid paper weight. AT&T didn't even have faith in the morons!

8. Even Steve Jobs hates it

As I blogged about on the Friday before it came out, the biggest iPhone news story on the day of its release was that Steve Jobs thought the wireless connection blows. Great vote of confidence in your product there, Steve. Not much else to say about that.

7. YouTube integration

You'd think this would be a good thing, right?

Think again.

First of all, it's slow. Why? Because as Mr. Jobs puts it, the network sucks. YouTube was only successful because people had the FAST bandwidth to watch the videos. Without fast bandwidth, YouTube sucks. One thing the iPhone doesn't have is network speed. QED YouTube on the iPhone sucks.

Second point is that it's going to make everything ELSE on the already crappy network SLOWER. I'm no Internet engineer or anything, but I do watch CSPAN a lot. I know that Senator Ted Stevens got made fun of a lot when he said the internet was a "series of tubes" but really, he's kind of right. All these YouTube videos are going to clog up the already slow "tubes" (ie bandwidth) that bring the Internet to these iPhones. Therefore, Steve Jobs is going to be even LESS happy with the network speed because of a function HIS COMPANY introduced - the ability to watch YouTube videos. Gotta love irony.

6. Greasy touch screen

Yuck.

Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

I didn't think of it until I touched this thing. I have a Blackberry. That screen gets greasy enough from holding it to your ear all day. That's NOTHING compared to the iPhone, especially since there are no buttons at all, and it's just a touch screen. Smudge marks, bacteria, and germs abound. I'm getting grossed out writing about it. I have to stop before I vomit.

5. No way to add memory

So let's see. Say I hold a HUGE yard sale, sell everything I own, and come up with enough money to buy one of these things. I get the 4GB for two reasons: 1. I only have enough for the 4 gig and I'd have to sell my body to the night to be able to save up the extra cash for an 8GB and 2. You can add a memory card, like every other modern phone.

NOPE.

What kind of mobile phone manufacturer doesn't think to add an SD card slot? Goddamn, it's already a rip off that for the half million you're paying for your phone, you don't get at least 40 gigs worth of space, but come ON! You should at least be able to add your own expansion memory down the road... LIKE EVERY OTHER PHONE ON THE MARKET.

4. No copy and paste, no mp3 ringtones

Pure stupidity.

3. Battery power - a HA - I was right!!!

Back in January, I said, "5 hours of talk time. Which everyone knows really means like 2 hours of talk time. Going for a ride and you want to listen to mp3s? I'm sure that will drain your batteries pretty fast. All of a sudden, those 2 hours of talk time is now like 60-90 minutes worth of talk time. Hell, I could talk longer than that about how much this product blows."

I couldn't have been more right! Engadget.com reports:
"Apple sez between 300-400 charges the iPhone will lose battery capacity -- you'll send it in and get the cell replaced for a fee. Meh. We knew this would be the case, but still, meh."

HOW CAN NO ONE BE PICKING UP THIS STORY?! 300-400 charges is less than a year's worth of use. I charge my phone every night. So you're telling me that if I charge it every night, within a year, I'm going to have to go without a phone for a few days while Apple gets around to replacing my phone. That's completely unacceptable.

2. RSS reader sucks

Not much to say here, except that Apple dropped the ball yet again. RSS (news feeds) are pretty much taking over the way people consume news and websites. Apple built a site just for the iPhone and it's not really good at all... it just adds a feed to Safari. There's absolutely no web app at the Apple iPhone RSS Reader site, which is completely counter-intuitive.

As I said earlier, I have a Blackberry, and I use MobaNews for RSS on my phone. It works great, it's fast, and it has a lot of selection. I highly suggest it to you iPhone users with next to no RSS support at all.

1. It will violate the GPL license

I'm a big advocate of the free software licenses and open source products. I was very disheartened to know that the iPhone will being violating the very licenses that are causing it to thrive. Unless you're in the industry, this probably won't make much sense to you, but I guarantee it's a turn off. If you want more information, check out this press release from the FSF and this article on C|Net:

http://www.fsf.org/iphone-gplv3

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9737829-7.html