Why I ditched my iPhone (for now)

(note: I'm posting this story here because I'm annoyed by all the happiness over yesterday's new iPhone "features" delivered by Steve.) Last January, I sat in a classroom at American University and ignored some boring speaker on lobbying in the EU while Steve Jobs held up the handheld device that would deliver us from evil, save the whales, end global warming, play music, read email, and iron my shirt. I immediately reached for my BlackBerry (then an 8700c) and thought "so what? No keyboard, no real email, could I ever use the damn thing and get work done?" I immediately was struck by how dumb Apple looked by partnering with Yahoo! (Yahoo???) to deliver "push" email capabilities "just like BlackBerry." Yeah, right. Ok, so fast forward to iDay. I had mothballed my 8700 for a work-issued Treo with GoodLink, letting me have real-time access to my office's exchange server, calendar, etc. For those of you who've never experienced real-time push and sync, it is the information equivilant of crack. I shit you not. In comparison to iPhone's email client, you simply cannot put the two side-by-side and expect to be satisfied unless you are willing to give up a whole featureset. Another series of events led me to switch to a different Treo, this one running Windows Mobile. Initially, I didn't hate it nearly as much as I thought I always would. The email client was good, it sync'd up with my exchange server, it didn't suck that bad at all. I spoke too soon. Never before had a phone turned me into a worse driver. Suddenly I was almost killing myself on a regular basis trying to answer calls. Not good, right? Back to the AT&T store I go. Ok, I gave up. I traded my Treo for a newly-reduced-in-price iPhone. I was actually excited. I even transfered all my music to it and stopped carrying my iPod. This was in September. Ok, so I hacked the shit out of the thing. Then the new firmware came. I held off until I could re-jailbreak it and upgraded, and hacked it again. But somewhere along the line, I realized I had the following problems with it, and hacking more just wouldn't solve them:

1. SMS has a really, really lame feature. No matter where you are, in a call, writing an email, etc, *BOOM* there it is. You can't escape it. You can't even end a call properly if you get an SMS in the middle of it. You have to hit "ignore" and then "end." It doesn't just go away.
2. The email blows. I mean really. Let's forget, for a moment, how I loathe HTML email for a second, and just look at the client itself. a) the formatting is all weird, with no way to tell how your mail will look on a normal screen. b) no push: this turned out to be a dealbreaker, people. Yahoo! just doesn't cut it, since honestly, 95% of people using Yahoo! mail are complete tools. Unprofessional to a T.
3. No GPS. Google maps is great, and driving directions are nice, but that doesn't do a damn thing for me when I don't know where I am. Yes, yes, I know there is a new location feature in the new firmware, but I had that as a hack from Navizon 4 months ago. It. Doesn't. Count.
4. No AIM. Why Apple dropped the ball on this I have no idea. Again, I had to install a jailbreak-hack to get this functionality. Why do I need to hack my phone to get a feature that every other phone I've ever owned has had? Come on, Steve.
5. I know this is stupid, but it's IMPOSSIBLE to use while driving. Yeah, I know how bad that is to complain about, but seriously folks, the less time I look away from the road, the better.
6. Battery life. I didn't think this would be an issue, but when I found myself needing the charge the phone before going to bed, I knew I was going to have problems. In contrast, my BlackBerry can go days without seeing an outlet.
7. The email really does blow. I'm one of those people who lives and dies my connectivity, and the bottom line is, iPhone 1.x doesn't make me feel connected to the world around me when I travel. It doesn't combine all my email into one inbox. It's too bad, really. I want to be in touch, not just have a cool web browser. I don't want to have to plug it into my laptop to sync the calendars. When I go away for a day or two, I want to leave my laptop at home. With the BlackBerry, I can do that. With iPhone, I felt like I had to take my laptop with me, just in case I needed to get something done.
8. Applications! Right now I have two web browsers, an AIM client, a Twitter client, Google Maps, TeleNav (awesome navigation software, talks to me like in-car navigation except I can take it with me), Google Sync (keeps my Google Calendar up to date with the BlackBerry, take THAT iCal), and a whole host of others. Apple hasn't released an SDK, and is only doing so grudgingly. I doubt they'll really embrace third-party apps like RIM has.

So, right now my iPhone is in mothballs, aka back in the box, awaiting the day when Apple offers me a software update that will let me do more than play with the damn thing. I'm sad. I like the concept, I just wish they had waited until they had a full featureset. I'm waiting for 2.0 now.