So I was writing an email to a friend about something or other on my iPhone 3GS. I needed to refer to some printed notes before completing the letter. So when I put down the phone, after a few moments the letter was sent without being finished and without any further intervention on my part.

On another occasion, I simply switched to a Web site to reference an account number, but when I returned to the Mail app to finish the letter, the window was closed, the letter sent. So what gives?

It’s not as if there is a preference to automatically send incomplete emails after an idle period, or when you switch to another app. This is surely not a “feature” in any way I can justify logically. It simply means that the recipient receives unfinished emails and, no doubt, begins to assume I’m either a spammer or crazy, or a little bit of both.

To be fair, maybe I’m missing something, but I find no preference setting for Mail on an iPhone that addresses this irregularity. I can’t believe it’s supposed to work that way.

Now I do understand Apple’s logic about prohibiting most multitasking functions on the iPhone. The more stuff that happens in the background, the more performance — and battery life — are negatively impacted. They have, however, found a way for you to use the telephone and access other features on the iPhone at the same time with an active 3G connection. This is something that you just can’t do on Verizon’s and Sprint’s CDMA network, even though lots of people are urging Apple to release a version of the iPhone for the former, the USA’s largest wireless carrier.

In all fairness, the iPhone is still fairly young in its development process. Surely there are items about the fit and finish of the software that will be mostly addressed over time, assuming anyone else has noticed this problem, and that Apple can be made to believe it’s something they need to address.

But looking at a far more mature product, Mac OS X, I have to expect better. So I wonder why the Finder is still dragged down with minor irritants. Sure, the original Carbon version might have been flaky because of the limitations of that programming scheme. But the highly-touted 64-bit Cocoa Finder ought to be relatively free of the problems of the past.

But it’s not.

Take the basics of Finder memory, recalling your preset viewing options, placement and window size. The first is usually correct, but the next two aren’t. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t and I find no predictable pattern of closing Finder windows, moving Finder windows or restarting that triggers such symptoms.

The 10.6.2 update doesn’t change a thing. But at least they got rid of that nasty Guest account bug, which threatened to zap the files of your Users folder, when switching between accounts. It’s not that I know anyone who was truly impacted, but a single victim is one victim too many.

In addition, on my dual quad-core Early 2008 Mac Pro with 16GB of RAM, I still see a slight delay in the appearance of icons in a Finder window, and we’re talking about column and list view. That, to me, makes very little sense in light of the promise of Snow Leopard.

Understand that my desktop Mac runs with minimal system enhancements, other than software for my Logitech input devices, plus ASM, a utility that recreates the Classic application window sensibility, including auto hiding of the apps you’re not using. I opted not to use Spaces, because some of my critical programs, such as Bias Peak Pro, an audio editing application, don’t play well with Apple’s native window switching feature.

These issues are not necessarily matters of preference or feature enhancements. They are all about basic functionality. Indeed, I wonder why the Finder engineers seem to have ongoing problems with fine tuning what is surely the most important application on a Mac, just as it’s been for the past 25 years.

What makes these issues far more important is how things differ on the Windows platform. After spending a decent amount of face time with Windows 7, I can tell you that Microsoft hasn’t a clue about delivering elegance. It’s not even close. When you look at the little things, such as the smoothness of mouse and window movement, you can see where Microsoft fails and Apple succeeds.

Under the surface, Windows 7 is basically just a refreshed version of Vista, but Microsoft has, with the past two system revisions, basically continued to tamper with the interface, largely to tout new features rather than make things work better. Yes, there’s a Dock-like taskbar that seems more sensible than its predecessor, but that’s not sufficient to make the Mac convert return to the Dark Side. Even the highly-touted speed improvements are so slight that most of you wouldn’t notice without a stop watch at hand.

But Microsoft is getting better and delivering mediocrity, so Apple needs to stay ahead of the game and get the little things to work more consistently.

So I was at the checkout line at a local Sam’s Club the other day, when I spied the person ahead of me completing a Windows 7 upgrade purchase. Now I probably should have just kept my mouth shut, but I never learned the finer points of that level of discretion, and I was feeling especially bold, so I spoke up.

As the cashier pretended to ignore the conversation, I suggested to the customer that maybe it was time to save over $100 of his hard earned money and invest it as a downpayment on a Mac. Yes, I smiled, to avoid conveying the impression that I was just being a smart aleck.

Fortunately, the customer was pretty gracious about the whole thing, and took my comments with a touch of good humor. He also admitted that his son had a new MacBook and had been strongly urging him to join the crowd and abandon his PC. When I asked why he hadn’t listened to his son, he laughed and said, well, he was running Office and all and he really didn’t want to go through the trouble of switching right now.

After explaining that there were tools to simplify the migration, my final salvo was a reminder that there was indeed a great version of Office for the Mac. I let the matter drop there, until he was informed that the version of the Windows 7 upgrade he wanted, Home Premium, was out of stock, but they could give him a break on, say, an Ultimate upgrade pack. At this point, I simply remarked, “Well, maybe God is trying to tell you something,” laughed and let the matter drop.

Now I am certainly willing to bet this particular Windows user isn’t about to switch anytime soon, or ever, unless his son manages to ultimately convince him that he ought to move to the Mac.

In the larger scheme of things, I’ve seen this very scene repeated on a number of occasions when I’ve made similar suggestions to people I know. Eventually some of them do make the transition and are the better for it. I’ve never personally encountered any evidence of buyer’s remorse.

But you have to look at the excuses for why Windows users won’t abandon that platform, and it is usually not because they actually prefer the Microsoft Way.

One common reason is the fact that Windows holds over 91% of the global operating system market, and that is the beginning and end of the argument. After all, they’re in good company, since market share must equate to quality. This is always a good time to invoke the McDonald’s argument, reminding them that more people eat at that fast food chain than at any other restaurant. Does that mean McDonald’s has the best food?

Lesser protests return to the common Mac myths that were perpetuated in the early days. First, that there’s very little software for Macs. This is an argument that you can win or lose depending on the software they actually need. If their business requires a vertical market app for which there’s no Mac equivalent, the argument may be over and done with. After all, a personal computer is a tool to run applications, and there’s no sense moving to a new platform, which is never easy in the best of circumstances, if the software you need is not available, and moving to something else may present serious obstacles.

However, that’s not a frequent occurrence. Most people use Office and other products that are either readily available in Mac versions, or for which useful — and often superior — substitutes might be found. I should mention, in passing, that I have pretty much converted all of my former Office documents to Apple’s iWork, and I do not feel that I am suffering at all for the experience.

The final argument is one that has lots of terms and conditions that don’t lend themselves to a few pithy one liners. Yes, the PC is cheaper than the Mac, but the argument doesn’t end there, as most of you know. The cause is largely the result of the fact that Apple absolutely refuses become just another bottom feeder by catering to customers who want cheap gear.

However, when you actually compare a Mac with a PC with all options and bundled software as equivalent as possible, the price difference is usually minimal or non-existent. This rule-book applies to every single Mac out there, but finding true equivalents can be a chore. It’s not just a matter of matching up a note-book’s screen size, processor type, RAM complement and hard drive size. There are all those little extras on the Mac, such as the built-in 802.11n and Bluetooth wireless networking, gigabit Ethernet, premium-quality LCD panels, extended life batteries, plus the rich selection of bundled software, such as Apple’s iLife, for which there are few even close equivalents on the Windows platform.

It’s also true that every version of Windows, save for Ultimate, is a crippled version, and you have to pay extra to get the top of the line. Mac OS X has the same features regardless of which Mac you purchase, and the basic software packages are essentially the same. But this is an argument you will never win, because the skeptic will just complain that they don’t want to pay for features they feel they don’t need, not realizing that adding them later on, if possible, might cost a whole lot more than they save during the initial purchase.

As I said, they hear but do not see, and that’s one main reason why the PC to Mac transition will continue to move at a very slow pace, unless Microsoft does something incredibly stupid. Or at least more stupid than anything they’ve done up till now.

Consider Microsoft’s plight. Hundreds of millions of customers, ranging from home users to the enterprise, bypassed Windows Vista and chose to stick with XP. Worse, many of them actually downgraded computers equipped with Vista, because they didn’t want to deal with its problems, real or imagined.

Without having the exact figures on hand, I think I’m safe in saying that the R&D costs spent to create Windows 7 are in the billions of dollars. Microsoft has a huge development staff to feed, and projects routinely take years to complete, even if Vista’s successor is mostly a refresh with some revised eye candy and a new name to counteract the stench of its predecessor.

You would assume, then, that Microsoft’s executives would really want to do everything they can to encourage their user base to dump an eight-year-old operating system and embrace Windows 7. Instead, they have made the upgrade path as draconian as possible. Instead of just putting the DVD in your PC’s drive, you have to first backup all your stuff to an external drive — assuming you have one — because you’re forced to do a clean installation to get the latest and greatest version of Windows.

The setup process will actually erase your PC’s hard drive, meaning that once Windows 7 is up and running, you’ll have to restore all your documents, and each and every application, assuming you even have the installers anymore. It’s very much different from the Mac, where installation files, even if they stretch beyond the Applications folder, are usually easy to find and copy to another drive.

Yes, Microsoft does include a utility to migrate your own files, and there are third party products that promise to simplify the XP to 7 upgrade mess. But there are no guarantees any of this stuff will really work reliably in the real world. No wonder computer shops are going to make a bundle selling you upgrade services.

Or you can just buy a new PC and put that old box out to pasture. While Microsoft doesn’t earn near as much money from each user license if you get Windows 7 preloaded on your new computer, they won’t be peppered with near as many support calls from disgruntled users.

On the other hand, the upgrade from Vista to 7 can, theoretically, be done in place without having to do anything more than sit back, click a few prompts and get on with your business. Well, at least that’s the theory, but the real world doesn’t always match Microsoft’s “head-in-the-sand” expectations. Or maybe they would rather not tell you.

Now consider what I tried to do this week after receiving a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate from Microsoft. You see, my particular installation of Vista Ultimate was done with VMWare Fusion 3.0, the recent major upgrade to their Mac virtualization software. My test Mac, by the way, is an Early 2008 Mac Pro with 16GB of RAM, running 10.6.2.

After the Vista installation was complete, I changed very few system settings beyond screen resolution. I also installed the latest Firefox, Opera and Safari to check how our sites appear on the Windows platform, plus the special bundled version of McAfee’s security suite supplied by VMWare.

So you’d think that a straight in place upgrade ought to proceed without difficulty. Well it would on any Mac even after far more system and application changes, but Microsoft is nothing if not inscrutable about such matters. What this means is that my Windows 7 installation was interrupted several times to warn me of potential compatibility issues.

What compatibility issues? Well, after closing the Windows 7 installation, I discovered a prompt from, believe it or not, Apple, to install QuickTime and Safari upgrades. Once that was done, I started the 7 installer again, only to be admonished to restart my PC to complete the installation of some unknown updates before trying Windows 7 again. After three failures, the installation actually began in earnest.

I won’t bother describing the process in detail. Except for somewhat prettier status screens, it’s not terribly different visually from Vista. Every process is frequently interrupted with “Please Wait…” prompts. I also ran into a few “Gathering additional information before expanding files” that were just as peculiar. Just what information does Microsoft need on a system that’s only a few steps from stock?

There were also several restarts during the process plus a notice that “Setup is upgrading registry settings” that had the usual frightening implications. Indeed, the dreaded Registry is one of the “features” that persists in Windows, despite being an endless source of performance bottlenecks, instability and general customer confusion. You’d think that Microsoft could manage to set aside a few billion dollars to just get rid of it and devise a settings database scheme that actually works.

In all fairness, I suppose some of the peculiarities might be attributed to running Windows in a virtualized environment rather than the real thing. On the other hand, neither VMWare nor Parallels ever presented problems installing Windows XP or Vista, so maybe it is a 7 thing after all, or just the consequence of upgrading an existing Vista setup rather than creating a new virtual machine.

At the end of the process, which consumed well over 90 minutes after the initial interruptions, Windows 7 restarted as a nearly virgin system. As you know, it doesn’t even include such basics as contact, calendar and even email software until you actually download and install the Windows Live Essentials files from Microsoft’s site. Talk about dumb!

While it’s too early to say much about Windows 7, I do agree with the critics that it’s noticeably snappier than Vista, with a more attractive interface. That doesn’t necessarily make it easier to use, and while I suppose it is more Mac-like, it doesn’t come close to replacing Apple’s operating system.

As I consider some of the absurd comments from so-called tech writers that I routinely disprove, I have to wonder what they are thinking about. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that maybe they are drinking too much of the “sauce” or inhaling mind-altering substances.

But it doesn’t seem to make sense that, with all the facts out there about Apple, Microsoft and other prominent tech companies, they continue to get so many basic facts completely incorrect, and then engage in totally wrongheaded speculation as the result.

One theory with which most of you no doubt agree is that lurid headlines and inflammatory text attract lots and lots of readers, particularly from Mac users and others who hold opposing views and are upset over the incorrect statements. Indeed, if you check out the online versions of some of the most offensive stories, you’ll see a rich selection of responses correcting the most egregious mistakes.

At the same time, the authors rarely, if ever, back down and admit they made a mistake. If they respond to the corrections, it’s often non-responsive or they just repeat the same misleading information. They must be masochists, you’d think, since they are so willing to simply sit back and take all that abuse.

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