If you read tech blogs, you’ve probably heard all of the gripes about what people want from their iPhones. You’ll hear things like tethering, unlocking, blah, blah, blah, … I’ve got an iPhone 3G and here’s my list of (all new gripes except one - with a good reason) gripes about the 3G iPhone:
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) Tethering (yea, this is #1 on most people’s list and I wanted to do something original), but tethering is such a nice feature, I wish so badly that I had it. I don’t want to download bittorrent movies over my AT&T network or anything, but here’s why I want it. This weekend, I’m staying at my mother-in-law’s house and she’s got crappy AOL dial-up and she always asks me to ‘fix’ her computer. She usually downloads some 3rd party software that some pop-up told her to install and she ends up muddy-ing up her whole machine. Re-downloading AVG Anti-Virus, Ad-Aware, wireshark (to check for weird network traffic), Firefox 3.0 and other stuff takes about 24 hours on dial-up AOL. Sure, I could fill up a thumb drive and take it wherever I go, but I’ve had many thumb drives die on me so it’s not reliable hardware, and I’d have to keep the thumb drive up-to-date all of the time. I have a laptop and an iPhone … If I could tether my laptop, I’d have it all downloaded in a few minutes and get on with my life.
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) Let the App-store applications have access to the iPod area of the iPhone. I want to have my alarm clock play a song instead of 10-year-old Mac sounds when I wake up. I want some 3rd party apps allow me to change the sort order on podcasts, so I can listen to them in reverse-date-order instead of newest-first (duh… Apple, this should be a 2-minute code fix - get on it!). I’m sure that Apple keeps the app/iPod memory spaces separate so the apps can’t muck with the protection on the iPod-side of things, but come on!
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) More stability - I swear that I’ve rebooted my iPhone 10 times in the last 30 days since I got it. I upgraded to the 2.0.1 software and it seems to have gotten better, but now it’s slower and hangs frequently. Some things just hang for what seems like minutes before the phone comes awake again. My guess is that it’s a memory leak somewhere in some 3rd party app and Apple just forced a garbage collection instead of the reboot in the OS. If this is the price to pay for 3rd party apps, I’d rather have a rock-solid iPhone with no apps, then a bug-ridden iPhone that can play tetris.
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) Map data seems like it’s at least a year out-of-date in Denver. I’m going to NYC this weekend, so we’ll see how current it is there, but come-on. Clean up the data a little bit. My kid wanted to go play putt-putt golf and I put my faith into my iPhone to find me one somewhere close to where I was in Denver, but went to 3 different ones and they were all out of business. I had to apologize to my 4 year old son 3 times. I blame myself for putting my son’s happiness in the hands of the iPhone map data now. This can be done easily on the Apple-side by just paying for updated data on their servers. It doesn’t even require a firmware update! Come-on Apple!
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) ‘It’s the little things that count’ - Apple has done some nice things with the tilt sensor and the touch interface. Things that you show off to friends and they say, “wow, that’s really sexy”, but in some areas of the phone’s interface, even the most basic of functionality is not to be seen, much less automatic like it is in other parts of the interface. For example: icons move around when updated, why can’t they stay where I put them? Another? Can we add a ‘clean up icons’ button somewhere? Another? How about when installing apps, we queue them up for download/install when the phone’s in sleep mode instead of switching back/forth to the app installation program? Another? Contact management is nice, but needs more. How about sorting by other things instead of just first or last name? Company name? Location? Nick-name? Come on! Think! Another? How about an accurate measure of battery time left? I see the tiny icon that looks like about 30-40% left, then plug it in and when the big battery shows up, it’s more like 50-60% left. How about an option to erase all of your contacts without wiping the whole phone? I needed this when first setting up the phone. The iTunes install prompted me to grab my gmail contact list (which was everyone that I’ve ever email’ed since before time - ebay people, craigslist people, … about 90% of the contact in gmail are people that I’ll never need to contact in my life again.). I blindly said, ‘yes’ and then spent about 5 hours cleaning out 90% of my contact list because there wasn’t a button to un-do everything. Hey, that’s an idea! Screw cut-n-paste, how about an un-do! :)
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) Conference calling seems broken. I tried one and it never ‘merged’ the calls. That sucked when I really needed it. Lost the first call, never got the second one to ‘connect’ back to the first guy. Had to apologize. Not good. This should actually be #1 on my list since it’s a basic phone thing and this should be a phone first, then a PDA, but I’m a geek. I do more PDA things than phone things with it anyway.
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) Queueing sending of photo emails if it can’t send immediately. This should be a quicky thing. Can’t connect to outgoing email, then queue until you can. Sending more than one photo email in a poor coverage area takes forever to fail and you have to wait a long time before it fails to send/queue a second one.
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) 3rd party apps suck - even the ‘pay’ ones. pterm is my chosen SSH client and I can’t even use arrow keys with it. $4.99 down the toilet. I also bought a NYC subway maps app for $2.99 - it has some of the stuff, but didn’t have street names or maps on some of the stops, so of course I got lost. Better off with a free subway map from the booth guy if you ask me.
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) If you take pictures and send them in email, it drains your battery in just a few hours. Both my wife and I are touring NYC this week and both of our iPhone 3G’s are needing recharging after only about 5-6 hours on the town. If you go on a vacation, take a real camera - the iPhone won’t cut it.
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) No way to ‘bulk’ upload images (that I know of, there might be a 3rd party app to do it that I’m not aware of). Sending images one at a time using the crappy keyboard to write the email just plain sucks.
That’s all I can think of now, but I’ll add more when I think of them.
To me, these are bigger issues than cut-n-paste, unlocking, more network selection, and the regular gripes that you hear about. Don’t get me wrong, my wife and I both love the iPhone, but it seems like Apple wanted to go the extra step and only did it in some very visible areas and neglected any ‘brains’ in the interface in other areas.
- Steve
