Five More Gripes About My iPhone
In the past week I’ve found myself spending a little too much time after work on my AT&T customer page (now that I’m, regrettably, an AT&T customer) wondering if there’s a handset I’d like more than my iPhone — even if I have to pay to upgrade. (Or, once selected, I might surf to eBay for a new solution…perhaps a Palm Centro?) Not that I actively dislike the iPhone — there’s a lot to like, such as Safari, SMS, iCal integration and visual voicemail — but there’s still some stuff that keeps iPhone from being the killer deal that it really should be.
It’s almost bad enough that it might be worth parting with if something better comes along.
Of course, I probably wouldn’t gripe as much if AT&T’s network didn’t suck so bad in my neighborhood. The fact that 50-75% of the time I can’t use my phone as a phone probably makes me more willing to criticize other features that I could live without. (But, frankly, even when the AT&T signal is good, I still seem to get a lot of drop-out from the iPhone>)
Still, beyond signal and service there are some flaws Apple needs to address. Arguing from the specific to the theoretical, those include:
(1.) Email not pushing — or pulling. This past week, though, problems *seem* to be growing beyond AT&T, and I wonder if maybe I’m looking at some of the iPhone 2.0 woes that others have complained about.
Specifically, it seems I have to restart my iPhone every 36 hours or so to get it to continue to download e-mail. I haven’t found the exact culprit (for starters, I was just happy to find a solution), but there *might* be some sort of problem when the iPhone drops off a Wi-Fi network that it thought it was connected to. It doesn’t seem to make the switch back to EDGE as gracefully as it did before the upgrade. So, I’m sort of waiting to see if something doesn’t get pushed through here in the next little while to figure that out. In the meantime, I’m cutting power, restarting and that seems to solve things for a while.
(2.) Audio jack. I’m sure it has something to do with the fact that the audio jack can also be used for a headset microphone, but my cassette adapter in my car doesn’t work. I hate that I have to spend more $$ on an iPhone specific adapter in order to listen to the iPod.
(3.) Battery life? What battery life. Well…it’d be good battery like for a portable computer. But this is a phone.
Ms. D recently took three travel days to Florida with her Treo 650 and no charger…she still had (barely) enough juice to call me when her plane landed so I could swing into Jackson’s very stupid arrival queue (three times…gotta keep moving…no waiting…) in order to pick her up. Could the iPhone last that long betwixt charges? Methinks not.
(4.) Me.com Webmail — won’t send using my work addy. Unlike Gmail, which brilliantly enables you to masquerade as your work persona from within the app, Me.com offers no such feature. So…I can’t use it. It doesn’t help me much to be “toddstauffer at me.com” when I need to be “todd at jacksonfreepress dot com.” The people who expect me to be @jacksonfreepress don’t need or want me to be @me.com. (Which, incidentally, I’m not all that fond of anyway.) Isn’t this an easy fix, Apple? Because if you don’t do it, I’m damn, darned, damned close to dropping .Mac/Me.com altogether.
(5.) No tether? Seriously? I mean, there’s sort of a tether solution, but further reading (and some AppStore shenanigans over tethering) has me disappointed that this isn’t a part of the Apple-enabled future for the iPhone. We’re paying a solid chunk of change to AT&T for the opportunity to surf on the phone; let’s make a Bluetooth tether a no-brainer for iPhone owners — particularly on the Mac. (You’d have legions of Windows users even happier with their iPhones in airports if it worked for them as well.)
I’ve been in plenty of airports, coffee shops and hotels with crappy-to-costly wireless. When I was portable with a PC laptop and Blackberry last year, one of the few pleasures of that combo was the ability to balance the laptop on one knee, my Blackberry on the other and use them together to surf and answer e-mail with the full-sized keyboard.
Apple should talk to AT&T and really, really make this happen. Even for $10 more per month or something.
Do it. Make it so. Engage.
Comments
Leave a Reply
-
Technorati
