I decided to keep the iPhone since I wasn't able to find a phone on the market at the time that would cover all of my needs. Overall I'm glad I kept it, but at the same time I still have some pretty major issues with it and will replace it when I find an appropriate phone, probably an android based phone when the are available.
The biggest disappointment with the iPhone is that it is pretty much unusable while driving, or even riding in a car. I know a lot of people say you shouldn't be using a phone while driving anyway, but the iPhone is far worse than most other phones. I can't make a quick call or respond to an SMS at all while driving. I thought I would get used to it, but the lack of a real keyboard makes it so that you have to look at the screen the entire time you are typing a message or trying to dial a number. Even answering the phone requires looking at the screen while other phones can be answered without a glance. When riding in a car as a passenger every tiny bump while trying to type a message results in the wrong key being pressed.
The second biggest disappointment is the continuing lack of push email. I didn't think this one would really bother me that much since I've never had a phone with full email capabilities before. Now that I've been using it for a while I see how push email really is a requirement for a smart phone. Although I have the iPhone set to check mail every 15 minutes it can go many hours without checking for new mail. It seems to only check for mail if I open the mail client software to see if I have mail regardless of the 15 minute setting.
The Internet applications don't seem to crash like they did when I first got the iPhone, but Safari does still crash from time to time. The crashes seem to occur if I am attempting to look at a site while using the Edge network (which is very slow) and there are a lot of slow loading images on the page. I'm not sure, but it appears the crash is due to some kind of timeout waiting for data and not due to the file size of the images on the page.
I've been using my phone as my alarm clock for a while now. Overall it works well, but it would be nice if I could set it to play songs randomly from a play list instead of being limited to playing one of the few ring tones Apple decided to let me use. Speaking of the arbitrary limitations Apple decided to implement, you still can't record audio or video with the iPhone, or at least you can't do it without hacking it. On top of all that it still does not support MMS, or attaching a photo, sound file, or movie to text messages. It can't even read them when a friend sends me one. This seems like it would be a simple fix, even if there is a hardware limitation preventing it, the networking capability through wifi and edge networks should offer some workarounds.
Ok, now that I've gotten the various things about the iPhone that annoy me out of my system I'll point out some of the things I like about it. Some of the things I like about it may work just as well on other phones too.
By far the most important feature to me of the iPhone is not a supported feature. The first app I installed after hacking my iPhone is the SSH client. With this I've been able to get emergency work done on servers several times. Once I actually restored files from a backup for a friend while sitting in Animal Kingdom at Disney. Yeah, I hate that I had to interrupt my vacation to do that, but it was a big deal to my friend and I would have had to take a bus back to the hotel to do it if I hadn't had SSH on my phone.
One of the features I didn't think I would really like that much is having an mp3 player built into my phone. To me I'd rather my phone be a communications device and save the battery for that purpose. I hate the idea of killing my phone battery because I was listening to music or an audiobook. I can gladly say I was wrong on this. Yeah, I might kill the battery of the phone while listening to music, but it is far better to have just one device I have to carry with me all day, remember to charge, and try not to drop. So far battery life hasn't been a real issue unless I forget to charge it, or when my wife and I travel together and wind up trying to share a charger.
The weather app on the phone looks nice, but there are several web sites with better and more up to date weather information. I've been using http://i.wund.com/ from Weather Underground lately and it has really helped me when making plans for outdoor activities.
Having the ability to read email on phone means I wind up spending a lot less time in front of the computer. I used to grab my laptop a few times a night on weeknights and several times a day on weekends just to check my mail and waste time surfing the web when I could be working around the house or relaxing in a hammock in the back yard.
So overall I like the iPhone, but I still want something a little more robust and with fewer restrictions.
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