I've been an iPhone user for all of a month now. I love the iPhone. It's a great device that lets me do virtually anything I can do on my laptop, from virtually anywhere I happen to be. And yes, I know that everybody is raving about it. But that doesn't mean that it’s perfect.
There are nine things that I find frustrating about my iPhone. In no particular order, here they are:
1. Only one application can run at a time. When the Google application bounces me over to Safari, it closes. When I return to it, I have to start all over again, rather than being able to just refine the previous search.
2. No copy and paste. If I have to go back and start from scratch, at least let me copy my previous search and paste it back in.
3. Battery life. I know that this is just a fact of life that I (and every other iPhone owner) will have to accept and deal with. Still, it's very frustrating -- when I text someone, I can almost see the battery gauge decrease.
4. The Apple applications that actually control core features -- the phone, SMS, and camera -- apparently can’t be replaced, even if some indie developer were to cook up something better using the iPhone SDK. Though these apps are usable, they lack features that I previously had on my three-year-old el cheapo Siemens handset.
5. No voice dialing. Many mobile users like to use voice dialing while driving. It's not just a convenience, it's practically a necessity. Dialing on the iPhone is not something you can easily accomplish while simultaneously watching the road.
6. No syncing via WiFi. Seriously, why do I have to carry a USB cable to sync my iPhone when it is already connected via WiFi? Or Bluetooth, for that matter. I'm flexible!
7. Poor control of alerts and sounds. When I get a text message I don't necessarily want it to appear as a preview in an alert, but you can only turn it off by using a passcode. Also, you can’t set a vibration alert for text messages -- only a tone -- and you get no warning at all if you are in silent mode.
8. The cartoonish SMS application leaves a lot to be desired. I would like the ability to forward messages, and to be able to save messages or conversations.
9. No ToDo synchronization. I finally broke down and created a list of things I needed to get done around the house (a honeydo list for the husbands out there) using Apple Mail's ToDo feature, and there seems to be no way to sync this on the iPhone. This alone would sell wives on letting their husbands get iPhones.
These are my biggest issues, but I'm not the only one who has noticed some weaknesses. There are numerous other concerns collected at pleasefixtheiphone.com.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the iPhone, and a lot of this is nitpicking. None of these issues are bothersome enough to make me stop using the iPhone, but they are things that would improve the user experience. And that's something I'm sure Steve Jobs & team want to eventually get right.
Larry Borsato has been a software developer, marketer, consultant, public speaker, and entrepreneur, among other things. For more of his unpredictable, yet often entertaining thoughts you can read his blog at larryborsato.com.
Comments
I hear you but at the same time I think some of your points are just wrong. cellular
1) Technically you can background a couple of the Apple applications (iPod most obviously and safari oddly enough to). But more to the point of your example a well written application should maintain it's state such that when you re-open it, it shows right back to where you were. This is how virtually all of Apple's programs work. So maybe get mad at the developers.
2) It's coming
3) About the best in the industry, you can use backpack style additional power systems. This is simply a choice between size and time. Most users can go a full day of use on a single charge.
4) Again, this is not entirely true. It appears that as long as someone used the SMS sending API's that they could write a new interface to SMS as we are starting to see with Mail applications. Apple just doesn't want someone else trying to interface with the SMS network. Give it time.
5) Check out some of the voice dialing programs on the AppStore.
6) MobileMe works well for many things even over the cellular network.
7) I don't understand why we don't have this control ether. I'll give you this one.
8) See item 1
9) See item 7. This is just crazy.
Just how I see it.
Thanks for excellent points Doug. I didn't know about the voice dialers on the app store; I've got one now and it is much better. As for MobileMe syncing, I'm sure it works fine, but why should I have to pay and use the Internet, when all I really to do is sync from my iTunes library?
As for the SMS sending APIs, I'm an Apple developer and I can't find them. Do you know where I can find anything about them?
Thanks for reading!
If you are a developer, and are (indeed) having a problem with the battery life, here is a (free!) idea for you: why not develop this little app (I'll pay for it!) that toggles the 3G settings and locationservice settings on and off in one go. If you don't need 3G and locationservices for the next few hours, just tap your app, and 3G and location services are off. This would save you a HUGE amount of batterylife. You can do this manually now of course, but it takes a lot of 'diggin', many screens and time before you have everything right. Make it cheap, and you sell a ton of it. (I would make it myself, but I'm not a developer. So here it is.)
Regards
Rudy
It appears that I extrapolated too far from what I knew on item 4. I had seen the application QuickSend which allows you to send SMS's through it and assumed that the SMS API was fully exposed. I was wrong. They are using an email to SMS gateway and looking forward to Apple releasing SMS API information. My bad! But I'm betting this is a question of when not if.
I'll grant you that it would be nice for general wireless syncing, I just brought up MobileMe because it takes wireless to the extreme and I'm expecting it to do this with files too in the near future. Bottomline is that an iPhone with MobileMe is a better iPhone than one without, so it is worth mentioning.
I cut Apple a little slack because we are only a few months into the SDK and then just got 2.x stable. Hopefully with each .x release we see apple makes more and more API's available for developers and this platform will continue to grow. I'm giving them till MacWorld expo to get Cut and Past as well as the server based background services. If we are still waiting by then, I'll start to get concerned.
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