Last week, I gave in and bought an iPhone. I did not get it because of its must-have cachet as a technocrati status symbol. Rather, I got it because I did not have many other smartphone options in my little town in Germany. This is despite the fact that T-Mobile is also marketing the G1.
Nonetheless, I am kind of disappointed with my purchase. It is a neat toy and I am impressed by what it can do. I am, however, really annoyed by what I can’t do with it. For one, the firewire cables and docking station I have from my second-gen iPod Classic are not compatible, even though the plugs are the same. Congratulations, Apple, you have made your product incompatible with a piece of wire. Further, I can’t sync it with iTunes using the iPhone’s onboard Bluetooth connection. Clearly, the point of this is to force me to buy additional new cables so I do not have to schlep the one that came with the iPhone with me. That kind of bundling is to be expected.
However, what really upsets me is the fact that I cannot use my Bluetooth keyboard with the iPhone. I have a really cool iGo Stowaway folding keyboard, which my wife got me as a present a few years ago. The keyboard is about passport-sized (about twice as think) and unfolds to a laptop-sized keyboard. It’s really very handy. However, the Bluetooth onboard the iPhone does not recognize the device and there are no apps for the keyboard in the App Store. iGo’s website simply states that it is not compatible with the iPhone. Obviously, I cannot load the software and drivers which came with the keyboard onto the iPhone and I am terrified that if I try to load a hack, Apple will brick my phone into a 200€ paperweight.
In many ways, my old Nokia N95 was a better, certainly more flexible, smartphone.
Insight: It is an absurd result that I cannot use a standardized peripheral with my own computing device. I have been using Apple products since 1982 (Apple II Plus, 32kb), but now, I am not purchasing another Apple product until I can do something as simple as hook-up my own keyboard to it. In the meantime, there was this gem, via Guy Kawasaki.
