Craig Dodge Taiwan

I've never had any love for Apple. There is nothing about their style or OS that I find particularly compelling. From what I understand, Apple's computers are better for those who work in design, graphics and video editing, but I have no need for such capabilities. People say that Apple's OS is more intuitive or user-friendly, but I've never had any problem navigating Windows. Let's say I started this journey indifferent to Apple.

The first Apple product I bought was an iPod. I've had a couple different versions of the iPod, including the first model they came out with that was capable of showing videos. It was easy enough to use, and did the job it was meant to do, but this was when I was first exposed to Apple's brand strategy: Get their hooks into the customer and never let go. Any accessories needed to be Apple approved and there were so many restrictions on how to manage and use the content on the iPod through iTunes. iTunes is easy enough, but doesn't work very smoothly on Windows and I just resent being told how to use my own purchase. Further, the Apple-approved accessories I bought were not necessarily of good quality. The cable I needed to connect the iPod to a TV had to be replaced twice, lasting only a year each time. So while the iPod was useful and stylish, it wasn't very dependable or durable.

A little over a year ago, shortly after starting my job traveling all over the Taipei metropolitan area coaching business English, I decided a smart phone would be very useful for keeping up with e-mail and other tasks for which I needed easy access to the Internet. Android was not yet available in Taiwan and the handsets with Windows OS in Taiwan were only available in Chinese, so my choices were limited to Blackberry or iPhone. I didn't care for the Blackberry keyboard or small screen size, so I bought an iPhone 3G.

The iPhone certainly proved to be useful, but not in any way more useful than what any other smart phone would be. I use it frequently for e-mail, Internet access, VoIP calling, organizing my calendar, reading ebooks, listening to music and taking pictures. There is no application or feature that I use that isn't also available on the other smart phones in the market. Additionally, other smart phones have even more features that would be useful to me that aren't available on the iPhone, especially the Android phones that have better integration with the Google services that I use so frequently. Unless you jailbreak the phone, a process with which I am uncomfortable, you are tied to Apple's iTunes and only Apple approved applications.

Even though the iPhone is useful, it is not dependable. I'm not a power caller, but I still get irritated by how often it drops calls, especially as I am driving through even south-central Taipei City. I will also get missed-call text messages at times when my phone shows a full signal, but no call ever rang. Even worse, on the one-year anniversary of the date I purchased the phone, it went into a crash-reboot cycle and could not be restored. The phone was replaced by the company according to the terms of the warranty, but it didn't instill confidence in the product. Now that the OS has been updated to OS4, the applications open and run very slowly and the phone occasionally crashes. All in all, these issues give me a very bad impression about the quality and dependability of the iPhone.

The bottom line is that there is no reason to choose an iPhone over other smart phones in the market. The specifications of many of the competitors are far superior to those of the iPhone and have the features that are most important to me. My cell phone service contract will be up for renewal at the end of this year and I'm already shopping for a replacement for my iPhone.