One reason to hate the iPhone

I got a call today. A friend of mine is organizing a gig featuring a band I play in, and he needed the phone numbers of other two members of the band. He couldn't write them down at the moment, so he asked me to send them over in a text message. 'Sure. no problem.' I said. At least it wouldn't have been a problem if I had any phone but an iPhone.

So, I opened the text message app, chose the addressee, and proceeded to unleash the procedure through which the user includes the phone number of a contact in a message. However, no matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find this feature. Bewildered, I decided to ask the Internet for an answer. I was astonished to find the truth. You just can't check your contact list from the text message app to add a phone number.

Before I owned this mockery of a device, I had the phone in the picture. As you can see, it would now be considered a prehistoric device, but when it came to include phone numbers from my contact list in text messages, it got the job done.

When I was looking for the solution to my problem, I acquired further knowledge on the iPhone lack of features. Some said 'You can copy the phone number and paste it into your message if your firmware is 3.x.' What? The first iPhones couldn't even do that? They didn't feature the copy/paste functionality? Did apps come in punched cards, too?

Hold your horses, Apple fanboy, for I know you can include contacts in messages. But, how does my iPhone do this exactly? First of all, you can't do that from the text message app. You have to exit and enter your contact list. But if you select a contact and choose to 'Share it' the following happens:

• If you are already writing a message, the contact will not be inserted in it. Instead, a new, unwanted and costly MMS containing the contact will be generated.
• Saying that the MMS contains the contact is actually a euphemism. What happens is this: a green bubble with the name of the contact written on it will appear in the text area of the MMS. What would I be sending if I sent that message? A green bubble? I don't want to spam my friends with green bubbles. It certainly doesn't look like they're going to get the numbers they asked for. In fact, I tried to send that to my girlfriend (who is smart enough to own other kind of phone) as a test, and I just got an error message. I suspect that if and only if the person who gets the MMS has an iPhone, the contact will be added to their list. Maybe.
• Just now I realized this problem wasn't complex enough for a list, but two elements seemed too few.

I still can't believe that such a hyped device lacks features as essential as this one. They advertise the new iPhone as 'The most amazing iPhone ever'. If they keep making them so useless, they'll never cease to amaze me, that's for sure.