IPhone Problem Report #3,847....Not That Anyone's Counting

iPHONE PROBLEM REPORT #3,847....NOT THAT ANYONE'S COUNTING....John Gordon, along with (it seems) everyone else on the planet, has complaints about his new iPhone:

My iPhone Address book, with about 400 entries, is pretty darned slow....Time to select an address on the Palm? Maybe 1-2 sec. On the iPhone? Maybe 6-7 seconds.

This kind of thing is just weird. Searching a database of several hundred items should take about — oh, a millisecond or so. Searching even a flat text file of that size shouldn't take more than a few milliseconds. Hell, searching a flat text file of that size even without any kind of search algorithm — that is, just starting at the top and working your way through the file character-by-character until you find the search target — shouldn't take more than 10 or 20 milliseconds. I've occasionally done this in the past when I was feeling lazy, and even an old 486 box could creak its way through a 100K file in a tenth of a second or so.

So what is going on here? How does stuff like this happen? Overall, the iPhone 2.0 really seems to be a piece of junk, but luckily for Apple, its owners are cutting them a remarkable amount of slack over it. I guess everyone is allowed a klunker now and again.

Via Brad DeLong.