Again I note that I haven't been very attentive to my blog... Too bad since I have received some e-mails from readers that actually found my writing interesting and had told me that they would follow it. Sorry about that - sometimes reality dictates what you can spend your time on.
Why the dramatic headline, you might ask? Actually it isn't as bad as could be assumed. My iPhone 3G is broken. And I couldn't find the receipt. And the one year warranty would run out January 6th. Luckily I had had a previous warranty exchange and the receipt from that had all the serials, IMEI numbers, purchase dates and stuff. So I could submit the phone for a repair/exchange.
What had happened to the phone then? Well, the 30-pin connector only gave a decent connection on about 2 cables out of 6 for syncing or charging and even those could easily be disconnected. Either had the 30-pin connector become loose or simply been worn out. I cleaned the connection but no change. In the process I also discovered that a small crack had started to develop in the plastic in one of the corners at the connector. Off to the mall with what documents that I had and submit it for service at the Swedish equivalent to AT&T -Telia. In Sweden, as in most European countries, we have no Apple Stores. They accepted the phone without any problem - in fact they were very friendly. It would probably take about 10 working days before I got it back and according to the sales rep I would receive a brand new phone.
So now I'm "stuck" with a Nokia E71 as my main phone and a 5th gen iPod Nano 8GB for music and video. The E71 isn't a bad phone - far from it. It has a whopping 1500 mAh battery which seems to go on forever compared to the iPhone, it multi tasks, it has a physical keyboard, camera with auto focus and decent video capabilities. But - the screen is really tiny, it doesn't sync with iTunes on my MacBook particularly well (hardly actually), the company Outlook mail service requires manual synch (not the phones fault though...), the quality of 3rd party applications is in many cases questionable even though they are always more expensive than their iPhone counterparts, the native Facebook application is medieval compared to the one on the iPhone and you can't control the music player with the button on the headset. And the call log still stinks - I can't see what phone number a particular caller used if he has more than one number in my phone book. The built in mail message client for SMS and e-mail is ancient compared to the iPhone and the browser isn't much better - slow and lots of redraws during rendering.
Apart from that I'm still impressed with the build quality and the size of the unit.
This is my second day the second time of being without an iPhone since October 2007 when I bought my original iPhone in NYC. So far I've had the following issues: The E71 has a 2.5 mm head phone connector, the car has a 3.5 mm plug - no joy using the E71 as a music player in the car. The TomTom maps of the E71 are ancient (surprisingly how much the streets are changing over a couple of years...)
Well, that's about all for the moment. I intend to keep this blog updated with my observations while the iPhone is being repaired.
