iPhone Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Well, the glass touch screen after you drop it, maybe. The iPhone debuts today, but wouldn't you know it, some people are already knocking it. A few of the reasons I already knew about, like all the Japanese cell phones that already do what the iPhone claims, but the two that stick out in my mind are:

6. You cannot remove its battery. Thanks for replicating one of the biggest complaints about the ipod, Apple!
13. No instant messaging.

The battery thing is pretty major, since most people like to do the trick of removing the battery and cleaning the contacts to get a little more juice out of it. This is probably why Apple said that they are releasing a battery that holds more charge than previously advertised. Well, Apple likes its designs to be consistent, and not making the product easy to open is always a design feature in the first version. But when that battery nears the end of its rechargeability, that phone is going to bulge out from the expansion, and may even blow up. Either way, look for complaints about the battery by this time next year.

The instant messaging problem caught my eye, but then I remembered that the whole iPhone internet interface runs off of Safari. All the other cell phone manufacturers have made agreements with the software companies to have stripped down versions of their IM's and browsers available for the phones, but Apple did not go that route. As far as I know, the only instant messaging service that works inside a browser is Google Chat, but I don't know if that will work for the iPhone.

Oh well. Apple will have a lot of these problems ironed out in the next few months. They're already manufacturing the next batch of phones with a scratch resistant plastic for the touch screen. Oh, but have fun security patching Safari now that those phones will become a tasty target for phishing exploits.