Let me take a short break from anti-corruption and eDiscovery and just tell you that I hate my iPhone 4S.

This should bother Apple.

I am the guy who is so in love with his iPad that I actively promote its use among my friends and colleagues. I brag about its functionality. I relate how I don’t lug along my laptop anymore: I just pop my iPad and a bluetooth keyboard into my briefcase and off I go. I show off my favorite Apps, and obsess—I don’t think that’s too strong a word—whenever I see another iPad, wondering if that person has better apps than me. (Purely from a can-I-use-my-iPad-better perspective, not competitively or anything). I’m being totally open and honest with you here.  Ask me a question, even a small, quick question, about the iPad, and you should expect a 30-minute presentation on why you should buy one.

So Apple really doesn’t want someone like me—’cause who doesn’t like the best kind of free advertising—in my car looking at an Apple flagship product and saying “what a piece of crap!”

My iPhone 4S user experience is so bad I almost ordered myself a Samsung Galaxy Nexus on Verizon. Seriously, I went all the way through sign up (on AmazonWireless…great deal at $99 for a $299 phone) and backed out right before hitting “buy.”  The only reason—the only reason—I backed away from the ledge was because I didn’t want to have to explain another electronics purchase to my wife.

Let me list just four issues I’m having with my iPhone 4S:

1. Siri is useless.  I think Siri is neat, don’t get me wrong.  But until Siri works with my 1-year-old yelling 4 inches away, and the TV on, and my kids in the background, it might as well not work at all.  Because let me tell you, unless there’s absolute silence in the room when I talk, all I get is, “I didn’t understand you.”  Real life has background noise, Apple.
2. The music player doesn’t play music.  My iPod function on my iPhone doesn’t work.  It plays one or two songs, and then stops.  I can’t get it to play anything once that happens.  I basically have to restart the phone.  This is just great when I’m, say, on a run.  Not entirely conducive to movement, when you have to stop, pull out the phone, figure out why it’s not playing, and then restart.  Every other song.
3. A neat computer, a crappy phone.  I remember once I was extolling the functions of my new watch to my sister.  “It can do this…it can do that, etc.”  I asked her what her watch did and she said, snidely, “it tells time.”  Well, the iPhone is a crappy phone.  As reported recently, there are about 100 pages in the support community about how you talk, and the person can’t hear you.  This happens to me every other call.  The speaker comes on even though I have headphones plugged in.  The person answers, and I say “hello?”  And, nothing.  They can’t hear me.  If it happened with my buddy, that’s fine.  But when it happens when I’m calling a heavy-hitter law firm partner, it makes me look bad.
4. Battery life.  I used to parrot a Steve Jobs’ master response to battery life complaints.  He said that an earlier iPhone drained quickly because there was so much cool stuff on the iPhone, you simply used it a lot.  When you use a phone more, the battery drains faster.  That’s what I thought when I started hearing these battery life complaints.  But no, that’s not it.  I can basically see my battery percentage drop as I look at my phone.  I’ve tried redoing contacts, undoing location services, changing the time zone setting.  Nothing works.  Including the battery.

Apple, please, please fix this.  I want so much to love every product you make.  I bought the original iPhone, and the iPhone 3, and the iPhone 4, and the 4S; and yes, I’m probably going to buy the iPhone 5 (the other reason I didn’t buy Android was I figured, they’re going to come out with the 5 sooner or later, why not wait?  This, despite the sure and certain knowledge that AT&T isn’t going to let me upgrade to the 5 so soon after upgrading to the 4S).

‘Cause, Apple, if you lose me, you lose your perfect customer.