 iTunes Rage
Submitted Wednesday, October 6, 2010 - 1:38:37 PM by Klaitu
Recently, my poor old phone broke. That's right, my LG Vu is no more. If you're not familiar, the Vu is like the poor man's iphone.
Well, the screen stopped being responsive. I'd hit something in the bottom left of the screen, and it would select something in the middle of the screen. It seemed to fix itself if you pushed harder on the screen.
Well, one day when I was trying to send a text message, I kept typing 2 letters, and when I tried to type the third (an "a") it would dump me back at the base screen because it thought I pushed exit (even though the exit button is on the other side of the screen).
I pushed that A button so hard that the screen cracked, and that was the end of my LG Vu.
Now, left without a phone I spread the word on facebook to all my internet friends to recommend the next phone I should get. Fortunately, my cousin just happened to have an unused old iphone 1 just lying around. You know, the first generation iphone.
Well, it's hard to beat "free" as a price for any iphone, so I jumped at the chance. I plugged the sim card from my Vu in there and discovered that I had to plug this thing into iTunes in order to register it.
So, after a trip to the store to get one of those USB connector cords, I installed iTunes and plugged it into my computer, and I registered with no problems. Since the phone was new, I disconnected it to play with it some, and that's when my problems began.
The phone works great, I installed a few free apps, browsed the web a little bit, watched some videos.. just to see what the phone could do. Then I decided I should put some music and pictures on it.. and for that, it was itunes time again.
So, I plugged it back into my computer.. and BLAM, instant computer crash. I rebooted, left the phone plugged in and tried to start itunes.. it wouldn't start. I tried various combinations of starting itunes and unplugging or plugging in the phone with no success.
I finally got frustrated with the whole process and just uninstalled iTunes entirely because it is a giant piece of crap.
But Steve Jobs is a crafty one. You can't charge your iPhone without having iTunes installed.
So I installed that crap again, and for whatever reason, it worked with no difficulties. I decided that while it was working, I would try to put some pictures on it, so I went through the convoluted and stupid process of getting pictures on and "syncing" them. When I clicked the sync button, it took about 2 hours fo put 4 pictures on. Why? Because it had to "back up" my iPhone. I didn't really need a backup at this point, but oh well.
Then, once that was done, I decided to put some music on there before I unplugged it, so I went through the absolutely awful MP3 selection process, which lets you choose songs at random, or choose songs kind of at random. I have 35 gigs worth of music, and only 8 gigs of ipod. Some of the music isn't going to fit.
So anyway, I finally get things mostly the way I want them, and I hit the "sync" button. First thing it does? It spends another 2 hours backing up my phone. Second thing it does? IT DELETES MY FREAKING PICTURES! Oddly enough, it did actually manage to put my music on there, but an hour later it came back with an error message saying that it couldn't put over 100 of the songs I had picked because "an error occurred".
Alright, fine, at least I have that music over with, right? Well, I went to put my pictures back on there, and what's the first thing it does? It spends 2 hours backing up my phone.. AGAIN. Then, it DELETES ALL MY MUSIC off the phone. Then it put the 4 pictures back on.
What. The. Crap. Apple?
How hard is this? Why do you have to make it so incredibly difficult just to do a simple thing like put music on my music playing phone?
Here's a novel idea.. register the phone as a hard drive, let me drag and drop the music I want directly into the phone. Same for pictures. Blam, done.
Why do I have to use your crappy Apple bloatware that takes hours to do a job that should take about 15 seconds?
Now, I've never been a big fan of iTunes, it's an awful MP3 player, an awful video player, and it won't even embed album art into MP3 files in terms of library functions. iTunes sucks, I knew it sucked before I even installed it..
But you know, I kind of thought.. apple phone, apple software. Apple is known for making good user experiences, surely this will work just fine and I'll be done with it.
Nope.
Since then I've discovered that every time I delete and reinstall iTunes I get exactly one plug-in to do whatever I want to the phone. After that, it's never going to connect again without deleting and reinstalling. So far I've reinstalled 7 times.
So, in short: Great phone, Apple. Too bad I have to use iTunes.
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