“What’s sad is that when product managers break stuff, these people blame themselves; my pain is abated by anger, theirs amplified by embarrassment.” – Tim Bray

This afternoon, I fought with both an iPhone 4 and an Samsung Galaxy S to find the answer to a question both promised to make easy and straight-forward.

Neither did for completely different reasons.

The keyboard on the iPhone is complete crap, slow with a counter-intuitive spell checker. The Swype keyboard on the Samsung made text entry easier though the GPS and bandwidth speeds on the were tedious and spotty to the point of useless.

In the end, turns out – we really didn’t need to use either. Where we were going was obvious and intuitive – once we got there. But, that’s not what the smartphone ads say.