iPhone 2.2: More Stuff We Don’t Need

I posted an article recently called “Apple’s Jobs Gives iPhone Customers What They Don’t Want” that discussed the upcoming 2.2 firmware and its new features.  iPhone firmware appears to give us Google Maps’ “Street view” and several other “features.”  It does not, however, make available any of the most requested features: MMS, copy & paste, Flash, voice dialing, bluetooth/wifi syncing, A2DP (stero bluetooth), landscape Mail view, video recording, text-message forwarding, or any of the over 1800 issues listed over at pleasefixtheiphone.com.  So what gives? Why is Apple not giving us these things? 

I should start by saying that MMS, or lack thereof, is the one things that bugs the crap out of me on the iPhone.  I’ve detailed before how useless and silly viewmymessage.com is. I can’t believe it’s not even something that can be accessed via a clicked URL.   But I don’t think the iPhone will ever have true MMS.  If Steve Jobs wanted MMS on the iPhone, it would be here by now.  No, they are phasing it out, which is arguably good in the long run, but at the expense of its usefulness today.  I don’t mind paying the extra few pennies each month for MMS.  Even just to receive the messages, but not send them.  But stop making the decision for me. 

I hate to say that the iPhone, a device that literally converted me from a mobile phone carrier to a smart phone carrier, as someone who sold more of these puppies in the last year than most Apple employees, is doing more to turn me off to Apple than anything else.  The iPhone and AppleTV both have let me down.  A lot.  So much so that even though I recently bought a new iMac (the 24″), I considered a nice new PC at a fraction of the cost, as prep for Windows 7, which looks to be really cool.  

Apple’s arrogance and inability to listen to its customers didn’t matter nearly as much when they were a tiny niche company.  But they play in the big leagues now, and I suspect that now that they have serious market share in the laptop and education market, they will find a mass defection in a few years as people start to get wise to their control tactics.  

I find the new iPhone firmware, even before I get my hands on it, a let down.  My iPhone can’t do what phones from 3 years before the iPhone existed does without sweating.   If Apple doesn’t start delivering, I suspect that the odds are very high that by the end of 2010 I’ll be carry an Android powered phone.