iPhone Gripes
Pedram Amini (pedram) <pedramaminigmailcom> Tuesday, July 24 2007 23:20.43 CDT


Based on Apple's history of releasing crappy first-rev products I was going to wait for the next release prior to purchasing the iPhone. An unfortunate drunken phone accident this weekend however accelerated my purchase plans.

First, I'll say something nice. The visual voicemail feature of the iPhone is very elegant. I deplore voicemail, to the point that anyone who knows me well knows to never leave me one. With the iPhone I actually look forward to voicemail now. You get a list of who called and at what time. You can click to play, fast forward, rewind. It's how voicemail should be. None of the nonsense of "hit 1 to listen to new messages, 3 for the next, 7 to erase....".

Now the ugly. What were the iPhone devs smoking when they made the following oversights:

* No custom ring tone. A $650 device with 8 gigs worth of mp3's and I'm limited to choosing between sounds such as a dog bark and a duck?

* Proprietary headphone jack. Why couldn't they make the jack cross-compatible with standard head phones? Probably because they want to up-sell you on cute, white, headphone adapters.

* No copy and paste. Manually typing in WEP keys sucks. Aside from that I could have maybe lived without copy/paste ... until I discovered the next atrocity.

* NO GROUP OR MULTIUSER TEXT MESSAGING! This is completely unacceptable. Every cell phone on the face of the planet has this capability. I'm especially upset about this because I text like a 16 year old girl. Organizing outings, after parties, etc. without group texting is next to impossible.

* Keyboard doesn't flip sideways. Flipping the phone sideways does not flip the keyboard sidways (unless you are in the browser). Typing on the widescreen keyboard is much easier and should be available for texting and e-mails. Retarded.

How's everyone else doing with theirs?

Comments
LordSephiroth Posted: Wednesday, July 25 2007 07:17.32 CDT
I think my gripes are pretty much the same (as are everyones).

I've had some off and on problems with it at random times, the most serious being a few days ago when the screen wouldn't come back up and someone was trying to call me. I dunno what happened, but the whole thing just blacked out. I eventually got it back up somehow, but it was a pretty big nuisance. It seems like the other problem I had was something to do with the 'End Call' button, I think it got twisted around or deformed somehow. I forgot exactly, but those are the only two real 'serious' issues I've had.

In addition to yours, the email kinda sucks. The fact they put ALL emails in the inbox (including sent) makes it a little unorganized. It would be nice to have some kind of filtering available so we could sort out the sent from received.

There are some features I'd like to see come soon as well, like chat and the ability to download music directly onto the phone. What I really NEED is GPS, especially since my Garmin is about to get smashed against the dashboard if it gets me lost again.

MohammadHosein Posted: Wednesday, July 25 2007 19:38.39 CDT
Pedram , maybe you could make more use out of this phone as a PyFreak ;)

Technocrat Posted: Thursday, August 9 2007 19:15.50 CDT
I wouldn't say 16...it is somewhere closer to 17.

MohammadHosein Posted: Wednesday, August 15 2007 14:14.55 CDT
http://www.cellphones.ca/news/post002527