Me and iPhone
So I finally got got an iPhone to make the insides of my pocket more stylish. The good and the bad (trust me, there’s no ugly with this toy) after the jump.
Good:
- Easy ‘net use
- It’s so easy to browse the Internet on the phone. The touchscreen means that clicking round websites is much easier than if I had to use a nubby phone joystick. It’s good that data’s free because going round the web on the iPhone whenever I’ve got a spare minute’s actually become a bit of a habit.
- Everything else
- The style, the build quality, the functionality…
Bad:
- No 3G
- Well this one was obvious. Websites are fast enough (especially with a lot of them iPhone-optimised), but you can always wish for faster.
- Basic SMS support
- I love delivery reports. The iPhone interface doesn’t easily support them. O2 doesn’t actually support them either unless I prepend my texts with an ugly string. It’s strange that such a new device doesn’t have a feature I saw implemented perfectly years ago on my SE T610. MMS is even worse - there’s no native MMS support and you have to mess about with Safari and passwords to view your messages. I suspect the reason for no MMS is because GPRS data is free so MMSs would cost nothing and O2 would lose 10p on every MMS sent as a replacement for an SMS.
- No MAPI (MailAPI) support
- Checking my work email over web is fine but inconvenient. Replying is even worse. Integration with the native mail client (or even a stand-alone Outlook clone) would be so much more convenient. Ingressed earphone jack socket:Not sure what sort of design oversight this was. The earphone socket is so far sunk into the chassis that most earphones I’ve tried don’t fit in. Shure’s produced a special extension for the iPhone (though not in so many words), but it still stings that I’d have to pay a bit more for a wire.
- Needing iTunes to sync
- Why do I need to keep a fully-featured music program on my work and home laptops to sync up my calendar? An Outlook plugin would make more sense.
- Inconsistent search results with Google Maps
- This really bugs me. Some results I find in Google Maps don’t appear in iPhone’s Map application. Aren’t they meant to be using the same data?
The iPhone really has made it easy for me to keep in touch with my friends on the go and I’ve even organised a few social activities on it. It’s obvious that Apple’s made some decisions on how I should do things. While some of the activities I do on the phone do have extremely well thought-out workflows (such as booking a restaurant), anything off the beaten path requires memory juggling and messing about with websites (like… MMS?!) The majority of the problems I’ve experienced can be fixed with software. Opening up the iPhone will allow the sort of diversity that made the desktop PC so useful. All in all, I’m expecting my cons list to be be totally out of date as soon as the SDK is released.
Tags: iPhone, iPhone SDK