iPhone 4 is Seriously Flawed, 3GS Still Packs a Punch for Cheap

Steve Jobs, the marketing genius he is managed to sell multiple million iPhones of the latest iteration till date. iPhone 4 has been a problems galore and a PR nightmare for Apple. iPhone 4 suffers from a serious problem – connectivity, the single most important feature of any phone!

iPhone 4, like all other iPhone releases managed to pull in the crowds, crash the servers and finally garner tremendous negative press.

iPhone 4 first impressions :

iPhone 4 body feels good but brittle too.  What good is a sexy body if you have to cover it to protect it!

What ruined the experience for me was the funky signal bars at the Apple store. I tried my best to avoid all the negative press about the flawed design before walking in to the Apple store. Tried handling the iPhone 4 the normal iPhone way and guess what, landscape mode hijacked the signal bars from 5 to 1! Having used the previous generation iPhones with AT&T, I totally understand the value of signal bars – more the better, be it data speed or call stability!

Surprisingly enough, iPhone 4 failed to woo me when it comes to UI responsiveness when compared to the 3GS iPhone. With the under-clocked custom silicon and double the RAM, I was definitely expecting much quicker responses. No noticeable performance increase. 3GS still lives, at least till the 4G release due next year.

My friend who jumped in on the pre-order is complaining about dropped calls even after using a headset. He never suffered from dropped calls with his 3GS iPhone which doesn’t paint a good picture either.

Micro-SIM dependency is a bummer given the connectivity problems plaguing the iPhone 4. If you want to switch to an older iPhone or a different phone for that important call, you have to get a Micro-SIM adapter or buy/get a regular SIM from your carrier. Not a convenient option at all.

On a slightly different note, I see prices of 3GS iPhones dropping massively! If you search carefully, you can snag a good condition iPhone 3GS for as little as $200 without giving AT&T a reason to dictate terms for 2 full years!

Bottom line : Dear Mr. Jobs, we salute your marketing skills but please don’t ask us to change the way we hold/handle our phones. It just doesn’t work that way. A software fix (iOS 4.01) for a hardware flaw? Seriously, we may not be Physics professors but we know this much that only a case can resolve this problem.

My love for iPhones still remains. I just don’t feel comfortable spending hundreds of dollars for something that subtracts value rather than adding to it!