iPhone 3G: A work in progress

Those of you envious of the hundreds of thousands of us who have the new iPhone 3G have nothing to be jealous about.

Despite all the hoopla about the elegant operating system and stunning screen, odds are that even a cheap cellphone has better voice quality; your old fashioned BlackBerry is more dependable than my e-mail system; and an inexpensive digital camera takes better quality pictures.

In short, the iPhone is a beautiful tiny computer, but in some ways it's like a combination hammer-screwdriver-wrench -- it does it all but none well. Many iPhone owners who must have 24/7 communications kept their old cellphones or BlackBerrys for dependable service.

iPhone owners normally don't talk about their problems with those who don't have these devices. It's like having a fool in one's family -- we only discuss the person's stupidity among one another; to outsiders he is a regular Einstein.

Don't get me wrong -- when my iPhone works properly it is a thing of beauty. I show the uninitiated how easy it is to read The New York Times for free, how I can manipulate the hundreds of pictures it stores by simply moving my fingers across the dazzling screen, listen to my music.

I also love to show off the hundreds of applications -- many for free -- I can download for productivity, health or just plain fun. I can buy things on eBay and do my banking at Bank of America.

When I am playing Texas hold 'em, don't bother me. That is, until the program crashes right when I am putting it all in the pot.

Almost all the applications I have bought or downloaded for free have crashed numerous times. There are eight applications my iPhone tells me are ready for updates, but it won't let me.

The battery life -- because it runs on the faster 3G broadband -- is so short, I have to keep one charger in the car and two at different ends of our home so it has juice.

The voice quality on the iPhone is poor. You can't turn up the volume loud enough for 61-year-olds like me to hear clearly and if I don't speak right into the tiny microphone people have trouble hearing me.

Once the phone went totally blank while it was ringing and it would not permit me to answer it. Thank God it was only my boss.

The touch screen can be so sensitive that I launch programs or websites I had no interest in starting or it can be so insensitive that a blowtorch wouldn't get it moving.

The camera takes good pictures as long as there is light out -- no flash, no video, no zoom.
The phone is set to automatically connect to any WiFi that is not password protected. It should have automatically activated at the Apple store in Westfarms mall when I took it there for help the first time. It didn't.

An expert at the Apple store (their Genius Bar is great) assured me that the latest program fix will correct the problem as well as all the others I have been having. Many people have reported that the third fix this month has corrected most of their issues. Mine didn't and I am not alone.

The last straw was when the iPhone started making phone calls on its own when I holstered the device. I took it back to Apple Monday and the good folks at the company's Genius Bar gave me a new one. (I wasn't the only person replacing my iPhone at the Apple store.) It seems to be working better.

Despite these problems we are optimists. It's a work in progress, we tell each other, and either the bugs will got sorted out in new fixes or Apple will give us redesigned new models for free.

 That is what my nephew Anthony tells me. Of course he is the one who sold me on the new iPhone and forgot to mention the little issues he had been having.

But then Anthony takes his iPod to bed with them, his wife, Kristin,cq revealed during a recent family get-together

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Me, I am less enamored, I just keep it on my nightstand -- just in case I might wake up in the middle of the night and decide on another hand of Texas hold 'em.