As I’ve written before, the iPhone isn’t a very good phone. I finally got so fed up I decided I should upgrade to the 3G phone even though I didn’t really need the features, or the extra $10/month. Before I headed to the Apple store, however, I checked the apple site discussion area to make sure the new version was in fact a better phone.

Big surprise. It isn’t. Folks are screaming about the dropped calls, and that the solution to the dropped calls is to disable the very feature that makes the 3G phone valuable: The 3G service.

So, what do iPhone users use for a phone? The original iPhone was bad enough already, but if the 3G version is worse, how are people making calls? My solution was simpler and cheaper than getting a new phone - I just reactivated my old Blackberry 7130. It’s not as slick, it’s browser kinda sucks, but it doesn’t drop calls.

I think I’ll keep my old iPhone for a little while, but the prices these things fetch on ebay are pretty enticing. Enough to buy a pretty snazzy new Blackberry 8-)

So I’ve waited patiently until this morning to get the iPhone 2.0 update for my iPhone from iTunes, and patiently went through the process of backing up, downloading a 200+mb file, etc. and in the end I get this error box:

I get this error box that says “We could not complete your iTunes Store request. An unknown error occurred (-9838).” This was no doubt the portion of the iTunes store code written by ex-Microsoft employees. It’s not good when you update the firmware in a product only to have it die in the middle, leaving you with an inoperable product. My iPhone is not configured at all now, and won’t until Apple gets its poo together and iTunes stops having unknown errors.

C’mon Apple, you can’t tell us you didn’t expect high traffic. You know darn well exactly how many iPhones are out there…why the problems?

So, until things calm down, I’ve bricked my phone by doing their update. Great.

[update] I’ve found that the folks in Germany are having similar problems with iBrick 2.0, if my German is still up to speed.

Or maybe “Should Be A Critical Element…” Because American business by and large doesn’t really care about security very much.

Thanks to Bruce Schneier we learn that the Indians are pushing to get the encryption keys to RIM’s BlackBerry system. What this means is that the messages sent to BlackBerrys in the field could be decrypted by the Indian government. Strangely, only non-corporate users are at risk for now.

How long do you think it will be before other governments get the keys in exactly the same way as the Indians did? How long do you think it will be before a corporate user is thought to be enough of a security concern that even corporate users must turn over keys?

The reason why this is significant for the BlackBerry vs iPhone situation is that the iPhone works differently. It doesn’t pass all messages through a server. It behaves like a computer connected to the internet, with a regular email client. So, as soon as someone is allowed to create an email client with encryption capabilities we will have secure mobile email. Apple has released the iPhone SDK, and is expected to unveil applications along with an improved version of the iPhone in June. It might even happen that Apple builds encryption into the mail client themselves.

The problem for RIM is that there is no way to do full decryption on the BlackBerry without doing it on their server, at least with their current software. Creating this after making deals with governments to provide access will be impossible.

So, if you believe in having privacy, and you conduct business overseas, it looks like BlackBerry isn’t the best choice.