Wednesday, August 29, 2007

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.

5 comments:

Melissa said...

My biggest pet peeve??? The fact that they dropped the price $200 in two months!!!!! Argh!!! That's what I get for being so impatient. I could have gotten one with twice the storage for $100 less than I paid! I love my iPhone and all, but there's something about this whole thing that seems unfair to the dedicated Apple lovers out there.

Unknown said...

What??? I've been under a rock and not watching the price. Stupid me! This is typical of Apple, as much as I like them. Their marketing tactics are terrible. This is like when I bought my G4 powerbook for the speed and the hard drive space, over the phone with a person, and then the next day, Apple released the notebook with the same storage for hundreds less. Could have died. But I love my powerbook.

We took the chance. As The Boyfriend says, we took the chance. We were on the forefront. We were the pioneers.

Melissa said...

Good news! They are going to offer a $100 Apple Store credit to early iPhone customers!

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

I'm happier now. :-)

Unknown said...

Girl, you are good.

I'll make that link work:

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

I wonder what you'll get at the Apple store.

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