The iPhone crashes. A lot.

Calls drop all the time. Safari, the Apple web browser, crashes continually. Woe on you if you navigate a partially-loaded page (fed up with the abysmally slow AT&T network). The mail app creaks when opening, often leaving you with a blank white unresponsive screen. The SMS program occasionally refuses to open.

Owning an iPhone—even the second-generation iPhone—is much like fighting through Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape 3.0 on Windows '95. When it works, you get a clear sense that this is the new way of doing things. Through the grime of incompetent implementation can be seen glances of what could, and likely will, be.

But holy shit, man. For the first time in a decade, I have to periodically shutdown and reboot a computing device in order to keep it working. What?! This is the era of protected memory spaces, of preemptive multitasking, of garbage collecting programming languages. The rats nest of memory leaks, of shuddering freezes and race conditions underlying the gloss, is totally inexcusable. How come nobody talks about this?

Apple justifies their aggressive control of their products—refusing to allow third party hardware manufacturers, third-party web, mail or SMS apps on the iPhone—by claiming this control makes sure things "just work." Apple, things aren't just working.

I can't say I regret my purchase. The iPhone—and particularly Safari—have changed how I interact with the Internet and organize myself. That browser is incredible. But I'd suggest people take a long and hard look at Google's android platform-based phones. Not everyone enjoys reliving the Windows 95 era.

Good thing I didn't try posting this from my iPhone—gotta go reboot the thing again.