On the heels of the “hot news” that there will be an iPhone SDK in 2008, I feel compelled to put forth my requests for the next software update. If Apple fixes these, I swear I’ll even buy a few ring tones.
I bought an iPhone after the the $200 price cut – the Apple evil geniuses found my price point, after I swore I would wait for the 2nd generation. Prior to that, I’d been quite happy with a Motorola PEBL and wished Motorola made a true successor to their “less phone” PEBL. Alas, they didn’t, so now I have an iPhone and it is the best phone I’ve owned. Still, there are a few rough edges and blogs are where the lazy go to complain:
- Email - Gmail on the iPhone is very broken. Steve Jobs should be making an engineer cry over the user experience trying use a gmail account on the iPhone. Gmail doesn't do IMAP (see update below), the iPhone doesn't support J2ME and I'm left using the (recently improved) browser-based mobile Gmail while missing the Gmail mobile app.
- Calendar - The built-in calendar app just sits there taunting me, refusing to use its network connection and consume my Google Calendar iCal feed. Once again, Safari plus a good web UI to the (partial) rescue.
- SMS - I have 8GB of storage but I can't save a draft of an SMS? Can't I pa-leez save it, I swear I'll only use a few kilobytes! And while they are fixing that, how about allowing sending an SMS to multiple people at one time. (Yeah, it might complicate threaded SMS conversations. I'll deal with it.) For extra credit, they could lift one of the few features I found handy in the Motorola software, a list of insertable quick phrases like "I'll be there in 10 minutes" or "I accidently killed your cat while you were away, but don't worry I've replaced it with a nearly identical one." No matter how effortless the typing (and it is pretty smooth), avoiding typing is a good thing.
- Bluetooth - If connected to a bluetooth headset and a call is answered using the phone's controls, the default audio source switches to the iPhone, not the headset. It answers with the bluetooth if you answer the call by pushing the button on the headset, Lobot-style. I can see why they did this, but I've almost died a couple times switching audio sources while driving, and wish it would default to the bluetooth unless I change it.
- Destructibility - My greatest fear is that one day the phone will slip from my hand and shatter like an ice crystal into a thousand tiny shards. Or just crack like Kevin Rose's did (although I prefer my cinematic, slow-motion imagination-version better, complete with exaggerated "Noooooo!!") Maybe the good folks at Apple can devise a low-intensity force field to be engaged when the accelerometer detects free fall? Or maybe that is how the evil geniuses in Cupertino get me to buy a 2nd-gen iPhone? </ul> 10/24/07 Update: I (and many others) complain, Google listens! They just unveiled IMAP for Gmail and it is a big improvement for using from the iPhone. Tags map to folders, and there are special folders to correspond to "Starred" and "All Mail" folders. And with IMAP the local changes are synched back to Gmail servers.