If tethering (aside from carrier restrictions) or not being able to override your home screen are dealbreakers for you, you should not buy an iPhone. These aren

If tethering (aside from carrier restrictions) or not being able to override your home screen are dealbreakers for you, you should not buy an iPhone. These aren't dealbreakers for most people. Instant messaging works fine via Push Notifications. Maybe not perfectly the way you want it to, but well enough that I don't have any problem with it and there's no concern of it eating my battery. Everything in life is about trade-offs. You can't have the good without the bad... or at least it takes a LOT of work to achieve that. Understanding that is key to good product design and sometimes it seems to me that Apple's the only one in this industry that does. Pandora works fine in the car. It doesn't work fine to leave it running and do something else. But when one is driving, it's fine. Yeah, you can't use your map while your music keeps running. Again, not a dealbreaker. Would be nice, I hope they add a well-managed multitasking solution in the future, but it's ridiculously low on my and most actual users' priority list. You wouldn't know that from the reams that have been written about how we absolutely must have multitasking or the device is junk. Anyway, all of the points you raised are ones on which people can have legitimate gripes with the device. They and other capabilities may be lacking that make the device not fit their needs. Apple ain't gonna add a bunch of stuff to the homescreen because that's not within their aesthetic. I'm fine with that -- prefer it even. There's a value in things being calm and serene. For me it outweighs the value of having the city I'm in written on my homescreen. Both choices are fine and that's my whole point: unless/until Apple becomes a monopoly (which is not even remotely in sight), there's no reason to call them evil over the App Store's restrictions -- just don't buy/develop for their phone if you don't like it. LOTS of people really, really do, so it's nonsensical to call the device junk, either. There are lots of choices for those who don't like it. And it's rare anymore for things to lock you in (like how it used to be in the bad old days) to proprietary formats that you can't possibly move aways from even if you desperately want to. I haven't heard a single person say that they hate their iPhone but just can't move away because of X. If X being missing is a big enough deal, people just switch. YAY! This seems like freedom to me.