8 iPhone Faults & Missing Features
- Speed - Switching between applications is painful, waiting on an application to load before using it is painful, even using some of the applications is painful. And I'm not talking about 3rd party non Apply apps either, this is happening in the contact list. Just opening up the contact list and trying to search for a particular person takes 5-7 seconds before the keyboard responds. Opening up the Maps application has a similar lag and causes me to miss-type quite a lot. Come on Apple, can't you get some speed in your apps?! Hell, the iPhone can run 3D games but it can't let you search a simple contact list without stuttering all over itself? Bah!
- Global search - Speaking of searching stuff, why can't I search for something anywhere on my iPhone? What do I do if I want to find a bookmark or something in my Notes? This is very frustrating and should be an easy fix.
- Free rotation everywhere! - Ok, this one really gets my goat. How come I can rotate my web pages in any direction but email doesn't rotate at all? And YouTube only rotates on one specific side but wont rotate to the other side? I tend to hold my phone with the home button on the left side. This gives me easy access to the volume and mute controls. But whenever I open a YouTube video it's upside down and I'm forced to physically rotate my phone 180°. Photos can be viewed from any angle, but my calendar is stuck in portrait mode. This makes no sense at all!
- To-Do List - What smartphone on the market doesn't have a to-do list? Oh sure, we have a Notes application but its not quite the same and it doesn't even sync with my computer! I know there are hundreds of to-do apps in the iTunes store but they don't sync with my computer either or are not very convenient or pretty. Oh and the iPhone Notes application doesn't rotate either. How nice. :P
- Recent Call info - This one has just hit me pretty recently when I was trying to find out when my wife had called the day before. The only time the iPhone displays the exact time of a call is on the day of that call. After 24 hours or so it switches into fuzzy logic mode and says things like "Yesterday" and "Friday" or "3/3/08" and there is no way to get an exact time of an old call.
- Safari stability - Web browser stability has gotten better lately but its still way to unstable. I can almost always crash it with a large page (say, a heated Slashdot discussion) or something with a lot of graphics. Sometimes its really bad and crashes after the page is fully loaded and I'm in the middle of reading the content. Like I said, its getting better, but I still experience at least one Safari crash a day and a couple of times in the recent past it's crashed so hard that I had to cold boot my iPhone. That's bad.
- A2DP - Ok, is the iPhone an iPod or not? If it is then you would think that they would make listening to music a priority. Why O' why can we not listen to music on our Bluetooth headsets?! For all its hype you would think that the iPhone would make listening to music easy and enjoyable. Not so.
- Bluetooth tethering, Cut & Paste, Flash, and more - these are all the old saws that have been floating around the 'net since the iPhone's launch and I just wanted to give a nod to them. Lately I have seen the need for tethering and how it could have saved me quite a lot of trouble. Lack of Cut & Paste is unacceptable and might be one of the things that drive me to pick up a Palm Pre. And it goes without saying that the missing Flash capability in the browser is a major problem. Fortunately, the word on the street is that the upcoming iPhone 3.0 update will take care of some of these things. We'll see...