10 Things to Hate About the Iphone
10 things to hate about the iPhone
I took delivery of my iPhone at the beginning of September, the beginning of a months personally tried me out of the office looked for very long periods and only in connection with the world via my mobile phone. It was a baptism of fire for me and the device.
You will have seen the ads, played with him in phone shops, looked on fellow commuters’ shoulders, borrowed from your friend. . . great is not it? Or is it?
In this article I will touch on some of the things about the device that really annoyed me. Only a little or a lot. And conserve the celestial karmic balance, I have a companion article on some of the things about the iPhone that I absolutely love. There is enough material for both articles, I assure you!
So here we go, in reverse order, the 10 things you should hate on the iPhone!
10th Grubby fingers and the onscreen keyboard
The iPhone’s onscreen keyboard is surprisingly effective and does not take long to get used to it.
Remember, your hands before you do this to wash, but! This is not just cosmetic: For some reason I manage a sticky mark under my right thumb that dust, crumbs biscuits or whatever can be drawn directly on the Delete button. Usually, there ends up the crumbs as I finish the 2 E-mail and begins to rub the entire message, character by character! This is not an exaggeration! However, it is not every day!
9th External Storage
I went the whole hog and took the 16GB iPhone now. I do not regret it! I’ve ripped is not selective with my music collection and have more or less all my CDs stored on the iPhone. This is 14 GB. Which leaves very little room for real data.
On other units, this is rarely a problem and non-volatile memory is typically flash memory of some description, size, Moore obeys’s law, doubling in size and speed every nine months or so and half in physical size every 2 years or so with a new “mini” or “Micro” format. I’ve run enough space on the mobile phone or smartphone, with an address book of over 500 names.
The problem on the iPhone is that there is no external memory slot and no way (short for wielding a soldering iron) expanding the internal memory. A shame. The iPod Touch has recently had a 32GB version, and I imagine that the 32GB iPhone is on its way. If that’s the legacy user base is left to ask what to do next.
8th Battery and Battery Life
The iPhone is simple – hardly an inch thick, smooth and seductive with those rounded edges. There are only a few buttons, to come and break open any door in your pocket and no memory to fill slots with lint and dirt.
One of the reasons for the sleek design is that the iPhone does not have a user removable battery. Battery can be changed by a service center, and over the two years I will have this device, I expect to keep changing the battery at least once, but I can not do it themselves. Even the battery is surprisingly small – it fits in this nice little package.
The price to be paid for life is the battery. My device is now 6 weeks old and have been fully cycled about 5 times (I tend to keep the battery on charge, but let him go flat at least once per week). If I do not permanently connected to the device, only the inspection of the product can leave twice per hour and receive calls with 3G and push me to a full working 10 to 12 hours between charges. When I click on the WiFi drops to 6 or 7 hours. When I use the GPS without WiFi, autonomy drop to 4 or 5 hours. If I really wanted to economical and last a full 24 hours, I had to disable both reduce Push email and 3G, and the brightness of the screen to a minimum.
For some people this is an important issue. For me, since I usually have either a PC and can be a USB cable, or spend the day driving with the iPhone as an iPod plugged in and charged by the trail car, one less constraint. But it remains a nuisance. I have not seen an iPhone equivalent of the Dell Latitude “slice” – a battery “pack” device for the iPhone that could more than double autonomy with minimal extra thick, but I assume that someone is working somewhere in the After Market .
7th Document Management
There is no equivalent to the Windows Mobile file manager or Mac Finder as up to iPhone, there is no possibility of manipulation of objects on a file device.
While the iPhone has a credible job of shielding you have the need to do any file on manipulation: for example, the camera is a photo album that is accessible in other applications, providing access to images (such as the application I use iBlogger you must write a short article on this page). But there are occasions when you need to manipulate individual file objects.
It is during installation and setup with the installation of root certificates for SSL so that communicating the device with an Exchange Server If you Apple’s Enterprise Deployment Tool (which locks the device and prevents further configuration changes, so do not always desirable), the only possibilities for the configuration of the device for Exchange set up a temporary IMAP account and downloading is a facility to open, or the creation of a website with the root certificate and put the appropriate MIME types on the Web (I could not this to work, by the way!). How much easier it would be, the certificate makes the device with the Windows Explorer (to connect to a PC via USB, download the device’s memory as a connected storage device) and be in a position to the certificate file from the memory on the iPhone . Open
The other key need for this function is the manipulation of attachments to e-mails. There is no way of saving attachments or linked documents on a selective new or forwarded message.
6th Navigating through e-mail folder
I tend to keep a lot of e-mails in my mailbox. Archives I once a year, and usually toward the end of next year. I am also quite busy and work on a dozen consulting and business development projects at a time. This means two things: a lot of e-mails and the need to organize these e-mails properly.
I organize my e-mails in trees – consulting projects in separate folders and these folders organized by client, all kept separately from companies I’m invested in and from my personal things. Probably 40 or 50 folders.
On Windows Mobile devices I can quite neatly organize, with the ability to expand or collapse parts of the folder structure. The iPhone detects the tree, but gives me no way of collapsing the hierarchy. The inbox is always at the top: Junk E-mail is always at the bottom. Moving incorrectly discarded e-mails navigate traversing the whole tree, which is a pain even with the noble gesture Flick. It is clumbsy and unnecessary.
5th E-mail Filtering offline content
The other side of this complexity is to manage how much of my “online repository” to take with me.
There is no need (and no room) to them all with me: I’m used to it by sensible limits on the section of the mail folder to take with me. Windows Mobile allows me to 1, 2 or 3 months worth of e-mail to take with me to say whether I take with me attachments, all e-mail or just the headers. I can even choose which folders to take or leave behind. And I do not need to worry if I go away and I miss a crucial folder – I can change the parameters of the device and download what is missing.
The iPhone is a little less flexible. It will not let me download attachments prevention: There is only loaded header of the message and the system left behind unless and until I choose the e-mail manually. I can choose how many days do I download e-mails from 1 day to 1 month, but beyond that I can not specify a limit. I have a filter to display the number of messages in a folder that I have 25 to 200 entries, but the interaction between this attitude and the deadline is not entirely clear. If you’re a light user, this is less of a problem: For a more serious e-mail users with a complex folder hieracrchy you have less control and may lead to memory-management issues as a result.
4th Message Management and Exchange
The worst problem with message management on the iPhone is really designed for Microsoft Exchange.
I am an expert user and really love Microsoft Exchange. It is not just my mail server: It is a comprehensive collaboration engine, with group and resource planning, rich address book, “to do” lists, journaling, contact histories, etc. I do not use it for fax and voice mail yet not, but that’s only a matter of no time to buy at the interface box to the PBX and turn this feature on made. So I’m there with the other 60% of businesses that are connected to user mailbox Exchange.
When the iPhone first appeared, the story was weak exchange interaction. It could not IMAP, but that is only a fraction of the story. No problem, it was not Apple’s intended primary audience either, but the users in the company wanted to clear the iPhone, so Apple has to work.
To be fair, they have done a lot with Apple iPhone 3G, to improve the story Exchange. The majority of security protocols there, including the critical functions such as remote wipe and SSL and supports Push. Enterprise Deployment is also setup with a dedicated business tool, the remote device supports the configuration simple. Unfortunately, Apple seems stopped midway through the API, and many have Exchange functionality is overlooked. Some of these, such as the loss of some data richness within calendar and contact items, not all users affected equally. Other elements are crucial.
The best way of describing it is like us with e-mail attachments. The Exchange API allows clients to forward the message without the content of the message is saved locally: You can send us the head and the server will append the plants and other multimedia content to the redirect. The iPhone does not understand this: First you have to download all the messages and attachments from the server to the iPhone has, then add to the forwarding address and return the entire message to the server. Moving a message between folders is the same and contains the same telecommunications services overhead. A nuisance for me, but not more than that: If you are not on a data packet and pay by the MB, then you have to be careful of this.
[Another side effect of this problem is that server-side disclaimers and signatures made available at the end of the forwarded message, rather than under the new text of the message. ]
3rd Reading HTML and rich text messages
I love HTML e-mails. I know that is said as a mortal sin in some circles, but as someone once, when email had been invented for http email would have been done in other ways? HTML is ubiquitous, it is clean and it works.
And of course, be the best mobile Web device on the market, the iPhone should be a fantastic HTML e-mail reader, right?
Well, it is very short. It makes some things really well. It gets the layout makes it inline graphics, it will also show some background information. But what if the text is really wide? It is packed, is not it? No, it is not. He would shrink to fit the text. He would text really, really small. And you can not cheat by turning the equipment so that the screen “broad” and the font larger, because the mail client does not support landscape presentation (why ???).
Of course you can zoom, because it is HTML, but then you have the whole line scan cameras, whizzing across the page until the end of the line, then rushes back to the beginning of the next line to receive. Oh dear!
2nd Task Switching
The iPhone is a beautiful, clean design. And part of the cool, clean look comes from the absence of bad short cut action buttons.
The iPhone has only three buttons to move to the edges of the device: the ON / OFF button on the top, the volume up / down switch on the side and the excellent single button mute button above the band. That’s it. The only other button on the device is the “Home” button on the front, below the screen.
The Home button stops the application you are committed to and will take you to the home page of the device – the beautiful page full of icons, each application will start on the device. Good job it’s pretty, because you see them a lot.
There is no way to go directly to your calendar or address book or e-mail. Apart from a “double click” action (freely configurable, either by phone favorites or select the controls iPod), is the only way to start a task to get back to the home page and back up into the desired application. Find an interesting URL in an e-mail that you are in Safari? Remember it well, or write it on, because if the text was created as a link you need to get back to the home page, restart Safari, enter the URL realize, you’ve got it wrong, you press the Home button again, you start by e-mail, open the e-mail, you will find the URL. . . and start again.
Or you can just select the URL and cut and paste into the browser address bar. . . excluded. . .
1st How on earth have you cut and paste?
Xerox Once the mouse, the GUI and WYSIWYG editing was invented, was to take it up to Apple, the technology that make it affordable and with the Lisa and the Mac. And Microsoft, so it everywhere, of course.
One of the joys of using the mouse or pointing device is that it gives you a third dimension as you move on the page. They are not of the line or the word or paragraph is limited – you can jump to the desired part of the document. And you can select parts of a document by a word, a line, a paragraph, and you do something with it. How do you cut it out. Or copy. Or drag it. It is normal. That is exactly what you are doing. You still have three hours seminars and training to use a mouse (or pen) and select point-click it and drag. They demonstrate once the student understands and does it.
But the company that the mouse helped to escape from the laboratory and get into the stores seem to have forgotten everything. Get your iPhone. Write a sentence. Write another. Oops – the second sentence would make more sense before the first. I’ll just cut and paste and the sentence. Oh no, not you! Since there is no cut and paste on the iPhone. Do you hear? No? Well, I’ll say it again! THERE IS NO Cut and Paste on the iPhone.
Google around a bit and you’ll find dozens of articles on the topic. You will find a surprise, outrage, horror. You can find even declare boldly Apple gurus, wise, that you do not cut and paste, because the iPhone offers more opportunities for direct use of the information, how the link URLs or phone numbers of detection or, er something.
The most likely explanation is that if Apple has decided to not use the pen, the only UI gesture on two fingers and drag over the page to select text was. But this gesture is already taken with the excellent pinch zoom motion on large documents and web pages.
It is a way out, but. Some very credible proof of concept demonstrations on the Web shows how a sustainable point and drag with your finger (like the pen selection this in Windows Mobile) would be unworkable and was not in conflict with another action on the screen iPhone.
Let us hope that the concept of working demos, and we see that implements cutting and pasting in an upcoming firmware release. In the meantime, at least twice a day I bet every iPhone user curse, shrug and give up the letter silently, that urgent memo, because it is not simply bothered to type it all be back.
So that’s it. Please do not get me wrong, I think the iPhone is a wonderful, iconic and transformational device. As with the Mac, it has our perception of what a mobile device should be changed. Cell phones and smartphones will never be the same.
It’s just that for all the brilliance, it remains inadequate. The iPhone is the product of a fertile and brilliant, yet highly introspective group of engineers. to innovate freely, unrestrained by any notion of reality or practicality, or what is currently left to the user thinks he or she wants, Apple have created a concept device. I am grateful they have, but I fear it is up to other companies with a clearer understanding of what the user can use is, above all, do whatever else the user to the iPhone to do the next step .
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