So my first month with the iPhone is over. Overall, I really do like the device. It’s absolutely best-in-class of any mobile device for web browsing and user interface, pretty close to Palm functionality (and clearly superior to Windows Mobile functionality and ease-of-use) for basic PDA functions, is an intuitive and great-sounding phone, and a decent iPod and media player.
Here, however, are my list of negatives.
- You can’t schedule mail polling. I only want to poll for my mail on my phone during weekdays, 8-5. I don’t want to poll every hour of every day. And particularly I don’t want to poll in the middle of the night when I’m trying to sleep and those administrators overseas have some kind of emergency that results in a mail-storm that I don’t want to deal with until I’m on-shift.
- You can’t install third-party apps without jailbreaking it. Yeah, I know, it’s pretty trivial, and I know, Apple is poised to open their store in less than a month, but there it is.
- Edge is slow. Knew it going in, agree with it more now that I own the device.
- Can’t use it to transfer music or videos from one of my computers to the other. Yes, sure, I know that’s a problem with all iPods, but there it is. I’d like to dump a gig or two of useful stuff onto the phone so I have it with me wherever I go, and can stop using this lousy 2GB keyring fob. But no, that’s not part of the Apple Way.
- Getting ringtones on the phone is annoying and expensive. Yes, there are workarounds, but they invalidate your product warranty. Stupidly.
- Limited on-board working memory. The browser chokes on complicated pages, and they can really slow down the phone.
- The web browser gives a really cryptic error message: “There are too many pop-up windows open”. I didn’t even know that I could have multiple tabs open in the browser for several weeks after owning the phone, nor did I know that they needed to be closed from time to time. Could really use some better visual clues.
- Love the mapping function, but the “Current Location” functionality is pretty darn inaccurate and spotty. I understand the lack of coverage and less-than-GPS location functionality is inherent to the way it figures out your location, but still, when I need most to figure out where the heck I am is when I’m in the middle of nowhere and don’t know where I’m going. Still have to carry around the old-fashioned map.
- Only one good and loud ringtone installed by default. The rest are way too quiet.
- Speaker output from the dock output stinks. From the headphone jack, it’s really quite good, but using the dock connector is extremely noisy with cell noise unless you shut off the mobile phone portion of the iPod.
- No Linux interoperability that I’ve been able to figure. I understand I can fix that by jailbreaking.
- No offline reader program of any sort. If I want to, for instance, read the unabridged version of the Count of Monte Cristo, I can only do so via Edge or Wi-Fi. The three core functions of a mobile device are PDA functionality, a phone, and music playback. Nice to have, immediately after that, is video playback and recording, an e-book reader, and games.
- Oh, yeah, no way to record video. Only still photos.
So, overall, I really like the device. But I like to be both picky and irritable. Thank the deity of your choice that you don’t have to live with this grumpy old man.
Unless you’re my wife.
Then I hope you enjoy your iPhone as much as I do, dear!