iPhone 3G Faster, Stronger, Better in Ad Than In Real Life

In yesterday’s Gizmodo, there was an article, “Shocker: iPhone 3G Faster, Stronger, Better in Ad Than In Real Life“, which pretty much summed up my 3G experience with iPhone:

As soon as I got my iPhone, I learned that 3G didn’t work and EDGE just barely worked at our house. In fact, 3G didn’t seem to work at all and EDGE was just so-so at places I usually visited. The call quality was not that great at our house (this was expected), but worked just fine at our local shops. Fine, I didn’t get iPhone for the 3G anyway (although it would be REALLY nice if it could work as the ad wanted us to believe), so the above video clip didn’t concern me that much. I thought that AT&T’s 3G just wasn’t quite ready yet and things would improve over time. Well, that was until today I read this piece Gizmodo news, “International iPhone Carriers Start the Apple Pile-On Over Sub-Par 3G“… I guess my hope for a better 3G in the future just got crushed (unless I change my iPhone, that is)…

Oh well, I still love my iPhone and I actually got it for the huge pool of 3rd party apps anyway. If Apple hadn’t opened (realistically speaking, it’s open with a big NDA tag on it) its iPhone platform, I wouldn’t be interested in getting it at all. Unfortunately, lots of problems are caused by the way Apple handles 3rd party apps. (Gosh, so, so very backward and clumsy… Why can’t they take a lesson from Palm?)

Talking about 3rd party apps… They are quite cool (even though they crash my iPhone at least once per day)! A week later since getting my iPhone, I’m still working on turning it into something like my old Palm PDA. iPhone is an excellent MP3 & video player and a lot of other things, but as far as PDA goes, it just doesn’t cut it. You can’t even sync the notes you make! On the other hand, this serious shortcoming seems to open up the floodgate for 3rd party developers. Anyway, those apps have been keeping me very busy these days as you might have guessed!

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[UPDATE 08/14/2008] According to BusinessWeek, Apple and chip maker Infineon are working on a software fix and iPhone 3G owners can upgrade the phones at the end of this or next month. So far, Apple still holds up its White House attitude and refuses to admit if there are any problems.

I hope that a software upgrade can solve this fiasco! Even though I don’t talk much on the phone or try to connect to the Net through EDGE (I haven’t been able to connect through 3G yet), a hardware recall will be very inconvenient!