The iPhone 4

My brother’s going to love this one.

You’d think a company in the throes of unleashing the most coveted and technologically advanced handheld device the world has ever seen would work out the glitches before releasing said item.

Doesn’t Apple have people to test things? Things as simple as voicemail, updates to free software, and phone calls?

I suppose the problems could have been foreseen during the developers conference that Steve Jobs delivered to highlight the new iPhone. During the presentation, he repeatedly asked the audience, mostly press and Apple insiders, to stop using their Wi-Fi devices. As he showcased Facetime, the video was a little glitchy, and he complained that some people were still using the available Wi-Fi. If a small, invite-only crowd is using too much bandwidth for showcasing a new technology on one device, it might not work that well in the real world.

Evidently not. For days Facetime was closer to Faceplant. You’d push the icon and end up making faces in the screen as you watched yourself talk while the top of the screen said “connecting …” Then, finally, it worked.

That shit is freaky.

Heart-ripping extraordinaire Mola Ram totally stoked on his iPhone 4 and his first App, the iLighter.

My first attempt was within my own domicile, talking to my girlfriend in the next room (a mere 10 feet to the left). When her face came on the screen I felt like that first heartless victim must have felt right before he burned to death in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I felt like my soul was being extracted. With the second attempt she was across town (the girlfriend, not my soul). She switched the video and like a first person video game, I was her, consuming a glass of red wine.

The background push technology seemed slightly iffy using Pandora and Scrabble. With a tune from Rush’s 2112 busting forth some operatic flair, I double tapped the home button and went into Scrabble. Pandora quietly faded out and stopped. It did it several times, like it needed attention. I’m sure all these bugs will quietly be addressed, but still, you’d think they’d have people for that.

The irony arrived solidly when the girlfriend went to sync her new phone with her old PC laptop. I joked that the free iTunes 9.2 update wouldn’t work because her computer would be too old. The joke, however, was on me.

iTunes updated just fine … (How do you start a sentence with a capital when the word in question starts with a lowercase?) but when I went to plug in the pretty damn pimp new iPhone 4, a message popped up, informing me that I needed an entirely new operating system. Now, given, I could continue operating the phone independent of my computer and update the software at the AT&T store, but that’s the equivalent of having an expensive brick.

Thus, new Mac OS on the way.

Feh.

My brother has always poo-pood all things Apple, despite his having switched to a Mac at home. He recently accepted a text on his non-iPhone which asked “would you like to update your software?” His phone then died. While the iPhone 4 has a mud puddle of annoying glitches, one can at least know that a death text will never arrive.

Hell, at the very least you could walk around and do nothing else but talk to your own face.