Bailout Schmailout

All this rhetoric about bailing out homeowners that bought houses they should never have bought in the first place makes me want to barf. Yeah, there were probably a lot of sleazy mortgage brokers, sleazy bank officers, greedy investors, etc, that help create this crisis, but fundamentally it's about homeowners that bought more house than they could safely or reasonably afford (likely based on the falsehood put forward by Realtors that real estate almost always goes up.) That's a little bit like saying inflation always occurs. In general that is a true statement, notice I said "in general".

Now the question becomes: "Why should the taxes the rest of us paid be used to cover the losses of these gamblers?" Yes, I called them gamblers as that's exactly what many of them were. Now that their bet is being called, those that bet house prices would always go up lost. Too bad! If they had put some equity into the house, or only bought a house that they could reasonably afford to pay the mortgage on, or not based their purchasing decisions on current short term teaser interest rates, they wouldn't need a bailout. They gambled that housing prices would continue to rise and they lost that bet. Yeah, the fallout is going to be painful, but again, why should our tax dollars be wasted on this?

iPhone disappointment

Well after being a Windows Mobile user for some years, I decided to try an iPhone, mostly because I'm cheap and AT&T gave me a better deal on the iPhone than the Tilt. I have to say I'm unimpressed. Like most of my experiences with Apple technology I'm a bit awed by the look and feel, but totally disappointed with the functionality and reliability. My biggest complaints are:

1. Missing features that even the most basic cellphones have such as beaming a contact to another phone. Sending and receiving MMS. Taking a video instead of just photographs. Only bluetooth profiles supported are handsfree and headset. These sorts of omissions are absurd.



2. Few user settable options. Although Windows Mobile perhaps went overboard in allowing you to set options, the iPhone goes too far the other way. When getting my e-mail, I want it to GET my e-mail and not just tease me with a 2 line preview. A two line preview doesn't help much when I'm 35,000 ft over the Pacific ocean. I have found no way to change that behavior. There seem to many defaults like this that can't be changed in any obvious way.



3. In my experience Apple and Reliability are two words that just don't belong in the same sentence. This is based upon having a family that has owned too many iPods and now my experience with the iPhone. Sometimes it just hangs. It drops calls. It wouldn't connect to a network in Singapore without a lot of work (45 minutes on the phone with AT&T support), and even then it was unreliable in connecting to networks elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Now that I'm back, it refuses to update my e-mail.



4. Battery life is abysmal. If you just leave the phone in standby with all data options disabled, it might go 2-3 days between charges. If you talk much that time decreases. If you actually use the data features (which are hard not to given the mandatory data plan and that most applications rely on the data connection) then you likely won't make it to the end of the day on a single charge.



5. The device is slow. Sometimes it takes many seconds for it to respond to something. Even my grossly under powered Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard) was much more responsive.



6. Apple's tight fist around applications is just a royal pain. No turn-by-turn navigation software. Most applications require a data connection, which is great if you have one. But if you're in an area that you can't get one, or are roaming internationally and don't want to get killed in data charges, most applications are useless. Apparently the assumption is that you'll be connected all the time. That's a pretty big assumption in my opinion, especially given the spotty AT&T 3G coverage. No background applications.

All in all I'm pretty disappointed with the phone. I think it is probably fantastic hardware crippled by immature software and poor marketing and business-policy decisions. Hopefully Apple can fix these problems before the next generation of iPhone comes out. At the moment it seems more suitable as a game platform than a usable business tool.