Some iPhone Gripes, Part 1
I love the iPhone. But it is a work in progress, let’s face it. I wanted to quickly list a bunch of my specific issues with iPhone in the hopes that someone at Apple is listening out there (crazy assumption, I know…). First post of several:
- When connectivity is limited and I choose to read/delete email, must you pop up seven different dialog boxes in rapid succession telling me “can’t get mail” and “can’t delete message”? Is that really relevant? Can’t you just queue my requests and actions and re-submit them once connectivity is re-established? Blackberry has been doing that for more than a decade. They even clue me in that a task is queued with a clock icon next to an unsent message.
- When I am on a call and you pop a calendar alert or a text message arrived, must you make me deal with the alert before you let me have access to the phone controls again? Why force me out of the context of the phone call? Why can’t I access things like “speaker” and “end call” before I have responded to a calendar alert or a new arriving text message.
- Push email is not compatible with the battery capacity you have chosen. Turning on push (for exchange servers) will kill the battery within 3-4 hours, rendering this feature completely unusable. Either fix it or warn users more prominently about this.
- Why must I enter my iTunes account password every time before downloading free apps?
- It takes 4-5 steps to delete a calendar event. Really? That’s the best UI you can come up with?
- New calendar events: can’t I please click the hour on which I want the new event scheduled before clicking the “+” button to create a new event? The interface for setting the time is so tedious, I should be able to tell you when I want the event schedule by a simply gesture.
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Gripe .5
AT&T voice “service” is an oxymoron on the island of Manhattan. They charge a $150 early termination, and I’m not sure that is within their rights given that I don’t believe that they’ve lived up to their end of their T’s & C’s 30% of calls drop in nyc…crazy.
I agree. I heard about a company doing crowd-sourced call quality information sourcing. Their goal is to report the actual experience of using a particular phone in a particular geography and publish the info widely. In our case, the call drop figure for iPhones in NYC would be astonishingly high. It is pretty embarrassing.
I’ve looked through their terms – I can’t seem to find what their obligation is to the consumer. If the phone worked only 1 day out of the week, I think they are still fine under their contract
I could not agree more with your first point. I have several additional sub-gripes with the iPhone mail program:
a) Checking more than one e-mail account is a tedious and irritating task. It takes far too many steps to switch between one inbox and another.
b) Some people love landscape mode. I don’t. In fact, I hate it when I happen to tilt my iPhone enough to trigger the landscape view, then have to wait another few seconds to flip it back.
c) I like to clear out my inbox. But checking off 10+ e-mails every time is becoming an exercise in patience. How about a “select all” feature when deleting e-mails?
there is an unbelievably amazing program – that works only on jailbroken phones – which blocks all those annoying pop-ups on your phone. e.g. waiting on the subway, no internet connection, random confirmations you don’t want when you dock your phone etc etc.
it’s the 10th or so significant feature I’ve been able to tweak from opening my phone up outside Apple’s control. You would absolutely love it if you saw it…