Annoying iPhone Flaws and Pet Peeves : One Girl's Review

We've gone over what features I love about the iPhone in this mini iPhone review. The annoyances aren't outweighing my love, but they are causing me to flatly say: "If you are not obsessed with the iPhone, do not buy it now. If you are obsessed with your Blackberry, do not buy the iPhone."

My iPhone Pet Peeves

• For $500, you can buy a phone that does not text the beautiful pictures it takes. That's right. One of the glorious features of the iPhone is its picture quality. You can email a picture to an address you hopefully have in your address book, if not memorized in your head, but you cannot text an image.
• I also think you can't take video. You can watch video on the iPhone, and you can click straight to YouTube, but you cannot take your own video - I don' think.
  
• The keyboard. I know it's cool and on the screen and all, but I can't thumb-type. I hold the iPhone in my right hand, and type with my pointer finger with my left hand. I've seen others do it this way, so I'm not alone. This means that texting or emailing while driving is very hard. Harder than when you were doing it before.
  
• Deleting emails at a time. You get all of your email, and can delete your email, but to delete it, you can't mass delete. There are no little squares to check so that you can delete a bunch at a time. Kind of annoying.
• Ok, so the Visual Voicemail is cool. You can see a list of who called and click on the name to listen. Love it. But, as with all lists in the phone, the spaces holding the person's name its too small. I have long, slender fingers, but even I have hit the wrong person before, and called someone who I least wanted to call.
• Can't highlight a group of words. That would be helpful to copy and past a link, change something all at once, etc.
  
• Adding to the Calendar. If I am looking at the Day view (vs the Month or List view), and I want to add something at 3:00pm, my instinct is to double click in the 3:00pm slot. No can do. I have to hit a little + sign at the top right of the screen (which, if you were a man with thick fingers, this would be hard to hit) to enter an event from scratch, where I have to assign the time.
• Vibrate switch is easy to activate. There is a 'quick' switch if you want to quickly switch you phone onto vibrate. Apple put the vibrate button on the side, so that if you slide it into your purse, you could move the switch over and silence your phone.
• Answering a call. I use the earpiece that came with the phone. And it's great. It's the iPod earbuds but with a speaking device in it. It comes in handy when I jog, in that if I'm listening to music, and the phone rings, which fades out the music, I can click the button on my earphones and answer the call. For some reason, I don't think to do this when I'm not jogging, so I use the slider to unlock the phone and answer. Well, if you don't slide the slider in just the right place, it won't unlock, causing you to miss or be being rushed on answering your phone. There may be a button at the top, actually, that does this. I'll have to check it.

I still have not read the user manual for the iPhone. But if you would like the PDF, here it is (PDF). There's a lot to be learned with this iPhone. For example: today I just learned that if I was talking, and then hung up by pressing the little button on my earbuds, if I press it a second time it turns on the iPod and whatever album I was listening to 5 hours ago starts playing right where it left off.

But, there are some basic functions that it needs to include, namely texting an image. That's just absurd.

Mysteries of Meta Title and Description Tag Revealed

I get asked variations of questions about these tags as eager website owners try to figure out what to do with them to answer SEO needs, like: "Fill in your meta tags!" or "We'll give you Meta Tags for $$". But you want to know what the heck they are before you go and get these tags, or pay someone to get you keywords for your tags.

Title and Meta Description and Keyword Tags Overview

First of all, your keywords for the specific page go into these tags. These tags are specific to each page in your website, and are not used to generally describe what is on your whole site. They are located under the hood in your HTML code. Depending on how you update your website (straight HTML pages that you upload or through a content manager where you press Save or Publish), you will have different ways of accessing and customizing these. At their most basic level, they tell the search engine what the page is called, and what the search engine might find there.

We'll get to the pictures in a minute, but the most heavily weighted by the search engines is the Title Tag. The Meta Description Tag is less weighted, but very important for different reasons - actual people could read it in the search results and gauge if they want to click on your page or not. And how do they click on your page from the search results? By clicking on the Title Tag. The Meta Keyword Tag is not so important, but is a place where you can put a string of keywords that appear on the specific page.

Tag Definitions:
Title Tag: Shows up in your browser window and in search results (see both pictures). Search engines place good deal of weight on what you plug into here. Keywords should go at the front, as users scan the search results page and have their specific keyword that they just searched for on the brain.

The blue underlined text is the title tag that people click on to get to your page. Not just to your whole website, but to a specific page. The black text, in this case, is the meta description tag. The black text can also be viewable copy pulled from your actual page depending on the better keyword match. The green text is the URL, which is the direct way to get to that page on your website.

Meta Description Tag: It can show up in the search results when you run a search on a search engine like Google. It will only show up if there is a good keyword match between what is in meta description tag and what the user typed into the search box. Otherwise, it is
another indicator to the search engine about what is on the page. The main reason you want it filled in is to show the user a sentence about what the page is about. It's more of a marketing-type sentence and should be different than the content on your actual page. Different, as in, not identical.

The screen shot picture above shows how the meta description tag is displaying in the search results for the query: "jewelry bag travel". The below screen shot shows the first line of text on my jewelry bag page that this search result is pointing to. Usually, for a page with not a lot of content, and if there is no meta description tag, or if the copy in the tag is not a great match, the search engine will display snippets from the first few lines of actual copy from the page, and may include copy from your text based menus, etc.


This is the top of a browser window. The very tippy top has text in it. That's the title tag. See how it can show up everywhere? So you want to choose it carefully. Mine could be better, but this is what we've got for now. :) The white area is the Address Bar. It shows your URL, which was that green text from the search engine result in the picture above.

Meta Keyword Tag: This is just a long list of keywords found on the specific page like: "jewelry bag bags pouch pouches travel traveling jewlry silk pink brown drawstring pull snaps snap pocket pockets elastic" It doesn't have that much weight in the search engines, but it doesn't hurt to fill it in. And what do you fill it in with? Words that appear on the page and misspellings of those words. The meta keyword tag will not display anywhere and is only for the search engines to read.

Text on the Actual Page

See how the regular copy on this page is not the meta description tag we saw in the search results above. The title tag is in view in the top of the browser window (in picture above, not this one below). But note how the keyword that I'm targeting, "jewelry bag" is in some hot spots on the page. It is in linked copy below each image, and they all link to the specific color of jewelry bag. The text under these jewelry bag pictures is not an image. It is actual text, which is readable by search engines, which is what you want. If it's an image, the search engines can't read it. These tag images I have posted here are just images, and totally unreadable by search engines. But I have placed my desired target keywrods in other places of this post, so I can take the loss of actual text in this case.

Title and Meta Tag SumUp

Title tags are very important. The are read by users and search engines, and may be pulled by other websites who link to you, like the social networking sites like StumbleUpon. If someone uses a special website like StumbleUpon or ThisNext to vote for your page as a good page, that website will automatically pull your title tag and show it on their website. You may have Title and Meta tags filled in with keywords, but there are plenty of other places you need to put keywords, like in the body copy, alt tags, image file names (that's my theory anyway), headers and sub heads, menu copy, in text links pointing to your pages, etc etc. Now that you know this, the tricky and fun part is getting creative with how you place your keywords (that you have researched, of course). Hire out or think of creative ways yourself, but either way, be aware of it.

Good luck!

I Got the iPhone.

I got the iPhone. Gerdy made me. My justifications:

• It was released in the month of my 30th birthday
• I got a new project today," and "Gerdy (my dog) dragged me into the store on our walk that usually never involves W.95th and Broadway. How can I deny her."

Every time I take it out of my purse, people ask questions. If it's a man, he says: "Is that the iPhone?" If it's a woman, she says: "Is that the iPhone? Oh, is that your cat on there? Oh! My cat...yadda yadda."
I have a picture of my gray cat Dinah on the phone as my wallpaper, which is not that unusual, but the screen is so big and clear, that it looks revolutionary.

I'm timing myself for this post, to show you how the iPhone has improved my life. At 10:42pm I took a picture of myself on the iPhone to show you how good it is.

See how good I look? ;) Kidding. I'm at Panera, working and listening to Sarah McLachlan. At 10:43am I emailed it to myself. At 10:44am I answered an email while waiting for my picture to show up in my inbox (Panera has free wireless). By 10:45am, I had received the email, saved it to my computer, loaded up my FTP software and uploaded the picture to the FashionMista server so that it could display here on this blog. This means that at 10:42am I took a picture, and by 10:45am it was ready to go live on the web, whenever I finish yapping away on this post.

I was super excited when I got the iPhone, but really, I just felt complete. I am a Mac girl, so I have been waiting for years and years for Apple to release something that gives us a calendar and address book in the palm of our hands, just like everyone else

iPhone Highlights (in no particular order)

• If it's not in a case, it slides into my cloth lined wallet.


• Address book and calendar synch with my computer via iTunes. It literally updates just like an iPod


• When I synch the address book and calendar, the iPhone actually alerts me to how many contacts on each device - the iPhone and my computer, a PowerBookG4 - will be updated. This means I can type an event into my iPhone calendar, and it will fly into my computer calendar when I synch the iPod. Same with the Address book. And by "synch" I mean plug in the iPhone into my computer.


• While jogging and subsequently stretching, I can: listen to my 1200 songs while I jog, answer an incoming call from Boyfriend about when he is finishing golf, then send an email to a friend to reschedule drinks, then call my sister-in-law to pass along a thought on how she can get married housing at Ohio State. The best thoughts come while jogging in the sunshine, so it's best to have all the tools in one place to deal with or nurture all thoughts.


• iPhone earphones, which include a microphone to talk on, work as regular earphones. So I can plug them into my computer when working in a coffee shop. You could also have surround-sound phone if you like. Too consuming for me, but you might like it.


• While driving cross country on the highway in Ohio, I could quickly tell Boyfriend where the nearest Jiffy Lube was at the next exit, thanks to the Map function in iPhone that uses Google Maps.


• The Map function lets you zoom very far in to see small streets.


• Love the calculator. So cute and easy to use. My old phone calculator on my Nokia PDA reminded me of my TI-81 graphing calculator, but without the graphing feature.


• Ring tones. A personal favorite. Boyfriend's ring tone is an actual motorcycle that is revving up. My mom is a barking dog because her dog is always barking in the background when she calls me. My sister is chirping crickets because those are peaceful. My morning alarm are actual church bells, which actually don't do a great job of waking me up because they sound like real church bells outside, which is very peaceful.


• The clock and alarm. Spin wheel and you set the time. Look at an iPhone and you'll know what I mean.



• Camera is fabulous. It sucks battery life, but is so convenient.

I'll stop here. I'm going to write more on the pros and cons of the iPhone on my That IT Girl blog, but I am happy I got it. Typing is one thing that will be quite different from what you are used to. It is not very easy to type and drive at the same time, since the keys are displayed on the screen. That's right. It means that you can not feel buttons for keys.

More to come!

Free Vocal 411 From Google! 1-800-GOOG-411

I love GOOG 411! A little news flash in my Gmail told me about Google's new free 411 service for businesses currently percolating in their Google Labs. I called from my internet based (Vonage) land line, and the nicest mechanical man asked me: "What business name or category?" and without thinking, I just said "restaurant" and then it asked me which intersection or zip code. I wanted the number for a Joey's Pizza in Chagrin Falls, OH to see if it came up, but all I could think to say was "44022".

Not two seconds later, the man at GOOG 411 was giving me the top 8 results, starting with the very yummy Gamekeepers Tavern as a restaurant in or near 44022. Joey's Pizza was in there, as was Dinks. I tried "pizza" for 10025 in New York, and it really didn't have any pizza listings. That, or it could not understand me above my fan.

Next, I tried a direct search for Joey's Pizza. I started with "Cleveland, OH." I did not get a direct match. But clearly it was there. I tried "Moreland Hills, OH," but instead it gave me related listings, which included "Boston Market." Errr. Wrong. So then when GOOG asked me for my city and state, I gave the zip code of 44022 and stated the restaurant name. Bingo.

Extra Fun Things About Free GOOG 411:

• You can "Go Back" to go back to the place you were before. Then the GOOG Man says: "Going Back."
• Instead of a machine tinkering away after you say something, to indicate that it is thinking, a little guy is making machine noises, like "bleep dee dee bleep." And if there is a problem with what he is looking up, it will go "bleep dee dee bleep bloop bloop CONK CONK" and the GOOG Man says: "Let's just skip that part."
• You can just keep looking things up by saying "Go Back."
• The GOOG Man reads to you the address right away. He can connect you or give you more details, like recite the phone number.
• When you have found your number and you're on your mobile phone, you can just say "text message" and it will text message you (GOOG knows your mobile number) while it is connecting you to the place!

How GOOG 411 Helps Your Website SEO

To be included in GOOG 411, you need to submit your business to Google Local. Being included in Google Local gives you more chances of rising to the top in the search engines when someone does a search for your type of business and the Google Local results are displayed before all else. See this local Starbucks example. And don't forget: on Apple's new iPhone, that uses Google Maps to provide maps to phone user, the same thing is presented. So when a person is actually in their car looking to go somewhere, and they type in a search for your type of business in the local area, you will come up as a little red arrow pointing to exactly where you are, with phone number clearly displayed. My boyfriend and I just did it to find local golf stores in Portland, Maine because he was consumed with buying a (another) driver. So go submit yourself!

To use Google's free 411 service, dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone. There are still listings that are not in there. I checked for some local ones around our apartment. This may mean that the businesses need to enter themselves into Google Local, which used to just help with Internet searches. But now it also helps for free and fast 411. To add your business into Google Local, click here. Here are some good FAQs about GOOG 411. Residential 411 is not included as of this post.