| iLoveiHate my iPhone

iLove/iHate-my-iPhone When I first got my iPhone 3G in that trendy Apple store in New York Citys West Village, I was as entranced as anyone.

It was as if Id wandered into an exclusive Meatpacking District bar and successfully picked up an attractive model. And not the congenitally insecure type with crushing daddy issues, but the hip, sly, beautiful sort who knows cool places to go and incites envy among my associates.

As with any infatuation, I irked my friends by carrying on at length about my new love. It comes with YouTube and Google Maps! Isnt that awesome? Sigh. Oh, look at that screen! And those curves!

My PDAs with my new PDA were just as disconcerting as the canoodling of any new couple: Um, did you ask what the capital of Mongolia was? Let me just check the Googlepedias and ... Ulan Bator. Wanna look at keyboard cat on YouTube again? Awesome.

Put the damn thing away, said my friends. They didnt get it. They didnt get us.

Then came the inevitable bumps as the honeymoon drew to an end.

Me: Whadya mean you wont copy and paste? Everyone copies and pastes these days!

iPhone: Yeah, well you never asked, and what are you going to do anyway, break your contract? Ill copy and paste when Im good and ready.

We got copying and pasting worked out, but only when Apple saw fit to add it as a software feature that coincided with the third — yeah, thats right, third — release of the iPhone.

Id gotten the Russian mail-order bride of the gadget world: Hot, sexy, totally intractable. Oh, you can dress it up in a lot of apps, particularly if you toss some cash about. But even there the rules are set by Apple, and two-way communication isnt the companys strong suit.

In an era of tinkering, crowdsourcing, mashups and open software, Apple doesnt want to relate so much as be desired. Id hoped to love my iPhone. Instead Id fetishized it.

It rapidly became clear the bloom was off the rose. I may or may not have experimented by bringing jailbreaking into the mix to see if third-party developers could help satisfy my needs.

And I may or may not have had the sort of success youd expect if you carry this tortured metaphor to its logical conclusion. Jailbreakings great if youre a bigger geek than I, but it can complicate your life and phone.

I started talking bad about the phone to my friends. Little things stacked up, like the phones insistence on always downloading mobile versions of Web pages instead of the regular ones Id bought all that extra pretty screen for.

Id curse the tiny problems, frustrate myself trying to fix them and give up or wait until I got home to browse the Web on my computer.

And thats where it happened. As I installed a useful add-on in my computer’s Firefox Web browser, I had an epiphany: I am in an emotionally abusive relationship with my iPhone!

The iPhones pretty and charming, and I love it and hate it in about equal measure. But one things for sure about the iPhone: It doesnt compromise. Its an Apple product, after all. You get what Mr. Jobs thinks is best for you. Mostly, hes pretty much on the money, but its clear that when Apples wrong, the issues not open for debate.

But heres the thing. Leaving the relationship conceit aside for a moment, I paid a chunk of change for this thing. I also put up with AT&T. Finally, and most important, not only were certain promises made in breathless ad campaigns , consumers of technology now have certain expectations vis-a-vis freedom and flexibility.

All of everybody wasnt on the cover of Time for nothing, you know. Some of us know a thing or two about computer phone software n junk. Whether Apple likes it or not, the time of crowdsourcing and open source is here, and even those of us who dont know a compiler from an interpreter are getting used to it.

My little chunk of curvy tech is great strictly on its own terms. However, if you want to use the 16 gigs of memory you paid for and the accompanying USB cable as a portable hard drive, youd better get a Mac to go with it. If you yearn for the MP3 player to play files you drag and drop from your hard drive?

Well ... have you heard of iTunes? Its terrible and restrictive and Apple encourages you to learn to love it. For all their talk of customization and the App Store, Apple sets pretty restrictive boundaries. And you know what else you cant do? Install a good browser.

If youd prefer Firefox over Safari on your iPhone? Well, there is definitely no app for that. Like any good lunatic girlfriend, the iPhone doesnt want you hanging out with reliable old pals.

And Firefox does have the qualities of a good friend. Its dependable, adaptable and basically up for anything. If you and Firefox cant work out a solution to your problems, Firefox will introduce you to add-ons that might be able to help.

You need your browser to be an FTP client? Theres an add-on for that. You need a color-picker, a screen-capture application, a Twitter client or any of a host of other extensions? Theres almost certainly an add-on with your name on it, and Firefox will help you find it — for free.

Of course, Apples trying to help here and there. And why wouldnt they? Sales of iPhones are growing a lot faster than Apples Mac market. Apple recently released new firmware for existing iPhones to coincide with its launch of the new iPhone 3GS hardware.

The software upgrade finally adds copy and paste , includes Dictaphone software and tweaks a number of things that should probably have been in the last software release.

Its appreciated, but it leaves me flat. Its like your crappy significant other finally getting it together to remember your birthday by helping with laundry, or asking what you want for dinner.

Youre SUPPOSED to help with laundry, you jerk! And for dinner, Id like to use this glorified external hard drive as, you know, an external hard drive. Dropping fewer calls would be keen too.

Does the software upgrade let you use the video camera and hard drive that came with your old phone to record video? No. Buy the 3GS!

Did they include a browser setting so you dont have to tell the Internet youre browsing on a mobile device? Nope. Can you view Flash videos or Web sites? No, the iPhone doesnt want you looking at that sort of stuff.

And can you use the App Store to fix the various annoying problems still causing hiccups and annoyances? Well, sometimes, but not reliably. Things like browsers and Flash seem to be right off the table.

There are plenty of cool games, but when you want to copy and paste a phone number from a Web site into your phone app rather than chanting a string of numbers like an autistic Gregorian, the whimsical distraction of games might just escape you.

The iPhone remains a great piece of hardware. Its attractive, powerful and comes with GPS, a great touch screen and an accelerometer. It is however, nothing like the open-source beauties were getting to know. Firefox is at the top of the heap right now, but plays in the browser field. Android, however, is coming on stronger every day.

Googles open-source mobile operating system already does some crazy things. I just hope they dont mess up the market for developers as convincingly as Apple seems to have done quite successfully.

Daniel Harrison is frequently frustrated by his iPhone on Twitter and Facebook.

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