I bought a 16-gig White iPhone 3G the Tuesday following their release, and while I was initially wowed by it, the glow has started to wear off, and I’m thinking I have something approaching a lemon.

While I am impressed with the concept, the execution has left me cold, both from a hardware and software standpoint.

From the hardware side, my only complaint thus far is in regards to the cracking issue (more here). I’m infuriated. You’d think that Apple would have learned its lesson after the debacle with the G4 Cube systems. But no. Now I’m stuck with an iPhone that’s going to look progressively more and more shitty as time goes on because someone at Apple either decided that using a cheaper plastic was acceptable, or that they could skip the QA process.

On the software side, I have a laundry list of complaints. Those are:

• When purchasing from the iTunes store directly to the iPhone, I would frequently lose the song from both the iPhone and iTunes when trying to sync the purchases. I think (but am not 100% sure) that this is due to trying to do the sync while the iPhone is backing itself up.
• Oh, and here’s another one — why in the name of Christ do I need to sit through a tedious, time-consuming backup every time I dock my iPhone? There ought to be a setting in the config that lets me select my own backup interval, rather than be stuck with someone’s “good idea” as to what constitutes “back up often”.
• Dear god, has Apple’s coding really gotten so bad that the keyboard lags? Because I, and many others, are seeing that. I even experienced it last night while trying to dial a phone number from the keypad.
• This thing loses its connection constantly and I mean constantly. I can be walking through the middle of the parking lot at work, and about half the time I have five bars, and the other half I have “No Service”.

Now, let me state explicitly that I have treated this phone with kid gloves — with what I paid for this phone, I’m treating it with kid gloves and am not going to do anything to put it in harm’s way.

So. This was my first iPhone and it might very well be my last. What I expected from Apple would be what I’ve historically gotten from them — rock-solid hardware and software that performs well and is aesthetically pleasing. With what I’ve received, in the case of the iPhone 3G, I’m so beyond disappointed that it’s not even funny.

(Pictures of the cracking in my case to follow.)