Hello everyone! I’ve returned the iPhone to Apple. The manager was quite nice - he asked me why I was returning it, and I told him that I felt it was not deaf-friendly enough to use - no iChat, no way to tweak the vibrate function for multiple vibrates, no TAP plan - which essentially meant I was paying plenty of money for a voice plan I would never use, and so forth. The manager tried to suggest that the iPhone was TTY compatible with a special adapter and I nodded my head, then shook it, to indicate that I wasn’t interested in that suggestion. He was quite nice and happy to take my deaf perspective on the iPhone - hopefully he will share that with his superiors. When I walked out of the store, and looked at my return credit receipt, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I had been refunded the full amount for the iPhone - no restocking fee had been charged. Thanks, Apple!

I’m sad about having to return the iPhone. It promises huge potential for us deaf people, and the mobile web experience was unbeatable. Returning to my Treo, and using its web browser, I find that it is like returning to a little kid’s toy. However, I found that I missed the EVDO speeds on my Treo. I just wish the iPhone was on a 3G network! But the IM situation was just a big headache for me. I felt it was too much of a hassle for me to try to stick with the web based IM just to be able to keep the iPhone - which isn’t too deaf-friendly without any vibration notification of incoming IM’s.

Another sticking point for me was that I could not justify the price. $60 a month to use the iPhone?!? Come on, that’s a double whammy. Most deaf people pay $30 just for unlimited data, but with the iPhone, you have to pay for the voice plan that you cannot use too. I pay $30 a month for my Treo 700p on Sprint, using their SERO plan. Yes, my plan includes unlimited data, tethering, and 500 voice minutes for $30 a month. My wife and I had taken a hard look at our pager usage. Her Sidekick was falling apart, and we had to borrow a friend’s half-broken SK just to keep her connected. We were paying over $110 a month for our two pagers. We realized that if we tightened our belts a little, we could get by with sharing one device, and save a whole bunch of $ every month. Now our bill is $30. You can’t beat saving $80 a month. The iPhone would have taken us back up to almost the same level. If the AT&T TAP was allowed for the iPhone, it might have been different - it’d be easier to justify the $30 bill, but not with the clunky and deaf-unfriendly IM workarounds the iPhone currently has.

The iPhone has great access to email that I will miss. You can manually enable and disable email accounts easily, so it’s easy to set up your work email, enable it for work hours then once you’re done with work for the day, turn it off and not be bothered until the next morning. For those who desire tighter integration with work email (such as Microsoft Exchange), there are several options either now available or coming soon.

Web applications are still coming out for the iPhone at a good rate. I like this search page that allows you to access major sites when looking for various types of information, virtual or physical. There’s even a couple of games that utilize the accelerometer (the thingy inside the iPhone that can tell when you are moving it into landscape, and tells the screen to redraw accordingly).

On the topic of hearing aid compatibility, it appears that Apple is still testing the iPhone to see if it will qualify for an official hearing aid rating. We will have to see. Apple is saying (see remarks on page 6 on the linked PDF) that the iPhone’s volume can be amplified by 20+ Db just by adjusting the volume, so that will be good for hard of hearing users. I also have word that there apparently is going to be a meeting of some sort with Apple and AT&T to address the concerns of deaf and hard of hearing iPhone users. Hopefully that meeting will be fruitful.

I like the iPhone’s promise. It is good that the majority of issues for deaf and hard of hearing can be easily addressed with software updates. It will just take some good discussion with Apple and AT&T to help them understand our needs and hopefully the solutions won’t be too difficult to engineer, along with fixing plenty of bugs! But it’s just not what fits my needs right now. Hopefully by the time these issues are addressed, there will be a newer, better, faster, and cheaper version on the market. Plus I can redefine my Mac’s trackpad to scroll like the iPhone for the time being.