Got my new iPhone on Wednesday. Was locked on O2 but good old Ziphone fixed all. However one thing stuck me, just how disappointing the applications for it are and their implementation.
Before it arrived I spent many hours on YouTube etc looking for videos and stories about the iPhone's applications. The main ones I spotted were installer (obviously) and customize & summerboard.
With the videos I saw it was quick and easy, with summerboard you can scroll up/down with ease and change themes.
But in practice and for a first time user, it wasn’t the case at all.
Firstly, installer.app failed to find customize. Even a search yielded nothing. I had to go through the menu to find it. Then it listed 2 entries. Both IDENTICAL except one had an extra space in the description. This confused me for a start. When I installed it (I had to install the SUID to get it to run) I found it so slow it was unbearable. More often than not crashing out to the home screen, taking 2/3 minutes to open one menu or completely locking up the iPhone where only a hard reset will do.
So I took my chances and searched for summerboard. There were 2 versions again but one was labelled old so I went for the new one. That installed fine but it doesn’t actually do ANYTHING. I can’t flip up and down. That’s all I wanted it for and it doesn’t give me the option. It seems to me all these applications people are using are from different sources. The summerboard I saw in a video had tonnes of extra options; this one just allows me to change a few basic things like wallpaper and dock labels.
Then we get on to paid applications. Now I don’t know about you but IF I want to pay for a product it had better be darn good. But nearly all of the paid programmes were crap. There was on in the featured apps called Kate. It actually had the cheek to ask for a subscription based service. It didn’t even work. Just gave me a list of add-ons it installed but did nothing. It just sat in my home screen, telling me all features were on but they obviously weren’t.
Now I don’t know the inns and outs but surely it would make more sense to pay for say GIMP than it would a tiny programme that allows you to record video in bad quality? ANYWAY
My question finally, is this. Am I doing something wrong? Summerboard doesn’t seem to be like I’ve seen, customize is painfully slow and keeps crashing. I guess I’m just disappointed, I saw videos and articles about iSMS, controlling your pc from your iPhone (didn’t mention you had to pay to activate that), full customization, changing the carrier from T-Mobile to whatever you wanted, having your own custom SMS tones. So far it just reminds me of a computer which someone has installed one of those cheap shareware disks you can buy from a shop, filling your computer up with useless software and asking you to pay for them.
I don’t mean to come over angry in my first post. But I can’t seem to word my thoughts any other way.
07-03-2008, 02:41 PM
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