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Comment by joubert | Hacker News Reader

And yet, don't iPhone USERS have the best user experience of any (mobile) platform?

I guess that depends on the user. The user who wanted basic stuff like MMS, multi-tasking and tethering hasn't been getting the best experience.

Or the user who actually uses a phone to make calls.

Heh, I didn't want to start a opinion war but you have a point. One of the iPhone users I know actually went out and bought another phone to use in his car because he was so sick of dropped calls.

I thought the dropped call problems were over until yesterday. I have to turn off 3G in order to make a call. This phone is pathetic when it comes to making calls. My razr was so much better as a phone.

This has to be somewhat location specific. AT&T seems to have some of the best reception where I usually spend most of my time, the Gulf and East Coasts. The iPhone seems to get as good or better reception than my old Nokia (disclaimer: this was a very old Nokia). Apparently it is terrible on the West Coast.

Of course these are isolated data points. I do think that Apple has made a mistake by limiting the iPhone to one carrier, especially one that can arouse strong hatred like AT&T.

I'm sure that's AT&T. I'm in Australia and there's been no such problem personally or from anything I've heard.

Apple chose them as their exclusive US carrier, so I don't see much sense in passing the buck. But we use different frequencies for the most part so it could still be a phone problem and you would not experience the same issue.

There were initial issues with Optus in Australia - their network wasn't prepped for the volume the iPhone delivered, so disconnections and poor connections were common complaints for the first 2-3 months. I believe that's been sorted now.

I've had issues on Telstra. Sometimes the phone UI will prevent you from answering the call. Sometimes the phone crashes mid-call. Sometimes you answer the phone and you can hear the other party but they can't here you.

A similar thing happens on my Sony Ericsson S500 phone on Vodafone.

I don't know if it's the phone or the network - I haven't done much testing. It's quite irritating pressing the answer button repeatedly and the phone not answering the call, or when I call someone and I end up unable to hear them while they can hear me.

I've heard of a couple of complaints about low signal strength. (compared to other phones on the same network). (this was in Oz - think it may have been optus)

Possibly, but that's because Optus has a pretty sucky network for everyone. I understand (from reading whirlpool) that their new 3G network is not iPhone compatible as it's 900MHz

I think your information's out of date. I use Optus 3G on an iPhone in an area which was in exactly that position, but they upgraded a week before the iPhone came out. I think that upgrade happened nationwide. (Not that it's relevant to this thread, I know, but...)

I think your response was perfectly relevant to the conversation. It's all about discussion here!

It may just be AT&T in some regions too. I have never experienced the level of frustration that seems to emanate from iphone users in the Bay Area (I'm in Oregon).

Yeah, I experience problems with mine as well. Not dropped calls, but rather the software/OS freezing/crashing more often than it should. I expected much more from Apple in that regard.

Believe it or not, I originally purchased the iPhone for the ease of making calls, placing people on hold to answer the other caller, merging multiple callers and using the speakerphone option. It does not get much easier than the one button option and I haven't had any problems. A bonus was being able to load Skype and use it while in Mexico to avoid the ridiculous international rates.

Other "basic" stuff not in the iphone: pedometer, dual bootability and quantum teleportation.

OK, I'll give you MMS.

Multi-tasking and tethering have been standard smartphone features for a long time. I can personally remember those as far back as 2001.

To be totally honest, I had to look up what tethering meant today as I had no idea what the term meant.

Disclaimer: The closest I own to a smart phone is one of these email/phone/web devices they sell in Japan that has a pita interface to use.

True, but the iPhone is new whereas other phone oss' have been around for years. It takes time and manpower to code for these, and you have to start somewhere.

Yeah, and the iPhone started with OS X and went from there. Something tells me OS X can multi-task.

(Keep in mind: Playing music and txting / getting phone calls is multi-tasking.)

You forget. Apple's whole strategy is to remove features in order to focus a product. Apple wins by doing less than everyone else.

Who else sells a computer with only one mouse button? Who else sells a phone with only one button? No copy/paste? Awful APIs that prevent you from really reading camera data? First iPod had less disk space than any other player First iPod had no windows support Safari's extension support are crappy relative to FF or even IE OSX dock can display 1/100th the apps of menus on other OSes

Apple's strategy is to cut features. This is roughly equivalent to asceticism: finding enlightenment by doing less. Like asceticism, this seems a bad idea on the surface, but some people really seem happier doing it.

MMS is useful for talking to old legacy phones :/ Nice to have, but hardly critical.

In Europe everyone has MMS.

Tho' this is becoming less important because people on all platforms just post to Facebook or Flickr directly from their phones now, but even so, lack of MMS hurt iPhone early on.

Disagree. I doubt many iPhone users really mind. You email people your pictures instead of MMS :/ they get them when they're at their computer if their phone can't do email.

(I'm in Europe, not everyone has MMS).

Actually it was the other way round - my iPhone wielding friends complained that people kept sending them MMS messages that they had to visit a website to see!

Receiving MMS on the iPhone (on AT&T) has been a total joke so far.

You get a text message that says to go to viewmymessage.com with some ridiculous username & password pairing. Since you can't copy & paste, or multi-task, you have to somehow remember what that combination is. Of course, once you've managed to pull up the page, you find out that the multi-media part of the message is a SWF... Which the iPhone doesn't support.

I hear WWDC10 will unveil Grand Central Teleportation.

The user who wants his phone to just work without having to launch process monitors all the time would probably get a worse experience if multitasking was done wrong.

The iPhone, with rare exception, obeys the UI convention that leaving an app closes the app rather than leaving it running in the background. The exceptions to that (Phone and iPod) indicate at the top of the screen that they're still running in the background. OK, so third party apps could have that too. But once you start adding taskbars and process monitors to the phone, you still lose something.

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