The iPhone hasn't lived up to the hype. I bought one based on the great reviews, but, in retrospect, I haven't seen a serious review of the iPhone's capabilities, or, more accurately, its shortcomings. Many reviewers have ended up just being promoters, without really putting the device to any real tests.

Here is my review, based on really trying to use it.

Phone:
Reception has been really spotty with the phone. Calls cut out often.

Contacts:
If you're on the phone, you can't make new entries, as when someone on the phone gives you a name and number to call. 411 works well with the number being sent to you via SMS, but at a cost of $1.75 per 411 call!

There are no categories in the Contacts. Thus, I can't display only my contacts in one of my categories, such as Auto or Pool or Personal. I have to scroll through all 1,600 entries.

Apple almost fixed the search problem in the Contacts. You can now search by first or last name or company. Apple software is too simple. If you want to search by phone number or some part of the address, forget it. You can't do it. If you want to search on something in the Notes field, forget it. I don't think I will ever use the phonetic entries, so having fixed options for fields is really restrictive.

There's no cut and paste, or ability to copy a contact. So, if you have entered Bill's phones and address, and now you want to create a new entry for Ann, his wife, you can't leverage off the already entered info. You have to start from scratch.

A phone number is limited to only the main number that you dial, and you can't look at any of the contact's info after you've told it to dial. This means that you have to memorize or write down on a piece of paper the person's extension, or the navigation through an automated corporate phone tree. (You know, "Si usted hable Espanol, marke el nueve. If you want to hear a duck quack, press 3.")

Contact Fields:
Apple allows you to enter extra fields for a contact, but only the ones that big brother has made available, like Prefix, Middle, Suffix, Phonetic First or Last Name, and a few others, including "Notes". The only one I've found useful is "Notes" because I don't use and can't redefine any of the others. I use it for "Hours" for stores, and "Children" for parents, and for "Notes", but you're allowed only one note per person.

Web Browser:
Apple touts Safari as the best browser. But it can't display Flash or any videos that aren't on YouTube, even if they're in the same format as the ones on YouTube. Most of the sites I've looked at on Safari have little icons where the action is supposed to be. Unlike Mozilla, the real best browser, you can't see your history in Safari, you have to re-live it. So, when you slowly navigate through the web on Safari, and then you want to go back to the site you were at 10 clicks ago, you have to slog through 10 page loads in the reverse order.-(

Active pages: This device has 8 or 16 gigabytes, yet only 8 tabs can be resident at a time. Often a web page will want to open a new tab. If you already have 8 tabs open, you have to manually delete at least one tab to continue.

Performance: Maybe with a better radio, the performance will be better. But, with the mandatory $70/month cost of internet service for the iPhone, it's one of the slowest browsers. I've had far too many instances when I wanted to show someone something cool on the web. They usually start off pretty excited when they see the iPhone, but when you have to wait more than a minute to get anything to download enough to display, patience wears thin.

Other apps:

Camera:
This works ok, but there's no flash or zoom.
The photo viewer is nice with its zoom and flick-to-move-to-next picture. It would be better if I could tag the pictures and show off just the ones I want to, avoiding the ones I want to avoid.

Calendar:
It doesn't sync with Google Calendar, which allows me to manage my and my 3 kids' calendars, so I can't use it. I don't want to enter my calendar in two, un-related calendar systems. I hear that the Apple calendar might work if I spend a grand to buy an Apple computer to sync it to, but that's pretty steep for me. I tried using the alarm feature, but you can use only the few settings that Apple has decided you'll need.

Google calendar's access is pretty limited via the iPhone. I can view only a few days at a time by scrolling, then I can say only "Next" to get the next few days. There's no provision for searching and entry creation is really limited too, not allowing me to specify which of my kids' calendars I'm editing. (I get to edit only mine from the iPhone.)

Calculator:
I paid hundreds of dollars for the iPhone, and the only calculator it comes with is a 4-function calculator. No RPN, no date calculations, no financial, trig, or even square or square root. Fortunately, there's one available from Belfry SciCalc, but it requires a good wireless connection to work. So, if you happen to be out-of-range, you can't use it.

Maps:
This uses Google Maps, and works pretty well. The satellite view is really nice.I haven't found the traffic option to be very accurate.
My main complaint is that it's REALLY SLOW! Nine seconds to open up Maps and display whatever I searched for last time. Then another 5 seconds to change from directions to search mode.

SMS:
I thought this is one app was the one app that works and is logical. However, this one app is the reason I will not allow my kids to use an iPhone and I will no longer show off the iPhone to anyone. Granted that's a bit extreme, but let me tell you why. One day I was showing off a cool new app to a curious stranger. In the middle, she handed it back to me, saying that I just got a text message. Sure enough, I did. Apple was kind enough to interrupt my app and force me to acknowledge my first spam text message. Apple was also kind enough to display the phone number and the text. In this case, the text has a sexually-explicit spam message mentioning sex acts someone wanted to perform with my wife. Not only was it very embarrassing, but Apple has no way to turn off the "interrupt everything and look at this message" behavior for SMS. (AT&T isn't willing to turn off SMS (throw the baby out with the bathwater.) or charge me a "protection fee" of $5 per month to allow me to block individual callers.) Because I can't stop spammers from displaying content on my phone, I can't allow my kids to play with an iPhone and I won't risk being fired at work for sexual harrassment.

Notes:
This app needs Categories, so you can organize your notes, search capability, outline support, and more choices for type-ahead when only a few characters have been entered.

iPod:
This is almost good. It's probably great if all you listen to is pop music. But, if you listen to anything long that has lots of tracks that need to be played in order, like a concert or opera, you'll find it hard to play the tracks in order or to stop for a while and then come back to where you left off. (What? You don't want to start the one-hour track over at the beginning, just because you had to stop at a gas station?)

If you want to transfer an audio book into iTunes that you didn't buy from Apple or from Audible.com, then you'll have the same problem with sections and chapters playing out of order. If you play one book for the kids, then switch to your book, it might not start up from where you left off, so you have to spend some time searching. At the end of the day when you pick up the kids, you'll have to search through their book to find the spot where you left off. Bookmarks are a sorely-missing feature. Also, even though the Apple screen resolution is really good, the book "covers" from Audible are in such low resolution, that they're mostly unreadable.

What's missing from the iPhone's iPod?:

• Bookmarks that I can set for each playlist. I'll play one playlist for my 7-year-old, another for my 9-year-old, another for my 13-year-old, and others when different combinations of kids are in the car. 95% of my playlists are recorded BOOKS.
• Get "shuffle" mode to tell the difference between a book and music. Better yet, let us tag the content we have so that I can choose adult content (my kids don't like listening to Alan Greenspan or the NY Times!) and kid content or just tailor the mix how *I* want and how *I* feel is appropriate for those also listening to the content. This way I can shuffle through all the content that's of whatever genre *I* choose. (I don't need Big Brother to set in stone how I categorize what I listen to!) Apple & the recording industry can suggest tags, but please let us, the paying customers, tag it how WE want. Apple's software should allow this. We don't want to have the software switch to inappropriate content.

What's missing?

Many things are missing, so I have to carry around the iPhone as a phone, and also my Palm to do the following:

• A To-Do list with categories, repeats, and alarms.
• A Phone Log, so I can keep track of phone calls, such as the 10th time I've called Tech Support and they still haven't resolved my problem.
• Better and more type-ahead choices.
• A Phone with re-dial until I get connected to the number.
• Data-entry for use in Quicken, Money, or, better yet, Gnucash.
• A cool app would be to allow quick entry of prices at gas stations to one of the web sites that keeps track of prices.

Enough criticism for tonight.