10 Things to Hate About the iPhone

5 things to hate about the iPhone
I took delivery of my iPhone at the start of September, the start of a trying month Togel via gopay personally that saw me out of the office for very long periods and only in touch with the world via my phone. It was a baptism of fire for me and the device.

You will have seen the adverts, played with it in phone shops, looked over fellow commuters’ shoulders, borrowed your friend’s … great isn’t it? Or is it?

In this article I touch on some of the things about the device that have really irked me. Just a bit or quite a lot. And to maintain the celestial karmic balance I have a companion article on some of the things about the iPhone that I absolutely love. There’s enough material for both articles, I assure you!

So here we go, in reverse order, the 10 things that you should hate about the iPhone!

10. Grubby fingers and the onscreen keyboard
The iPhone’s onscreen keyboard is surprisingly effective and doesn’t take long to get used to.

Just remember to wash your hands before you do so, however! This isn’t just cosmetic: For some reason I manage to leave a sticky mark under my right thumb that attract dust, biscuit crumbs, or whatever, right over the erase key. Usually the crumb lands there just as I finish the 2 page email and starts to rub out the whole message character by character! This is not an exaggeration!! It is, however, not a daily occurrence!!

9. External memory
I went the whole hog and took the 16GB iPhone immediately. I don’t regret it! I haven’t been selective with my music collection and have more or less all my ripped CDs stored on the iPhone. That’s 14GB. Which leaves precious little room for real data.

On other devices this is rarely a problem and non-volatile storage is usually flash memory of some description, the size of which obeys Moore’s law and doubles in size and speed every 9 months or so and halves in physical size every 2 years or so with a new “mini” or “micro” format. I have yet to run out of space on a mobile phone or smartphone, even with an address book of over 500 names.

The problem on the iPhone is that there is no external memory slot and no way (short of wielding a soldering iron) of expanding the internal memory. A shame. The iPod Touch has recently spawned a 32GB version and I imagine that the 32GB iPhone is on its way. When that happens the legacy user base will be left wondering what to do next.

8. Battery and battery life
The iPhone is sleek – barely a centimetre thick and enticingly smooth with those rounded edges. There are few buttons, no little doors to come open and break off in your pocket and no memory slots to fill up with fluff and dirt.

One of the reasons for the smooth design is that the iPhone does not have a user removeable battery. The battery can be changed by a service centre, and over the two years I will keep this device I expect to have to change the battery at least once, but I cannot do it myself. Also the battery is surprisingly small – it has to be to fit into this neat little package.

The price you pay for this is battery life. My device is now 6 weeks old and have been fully cycled about 5 times (I tend to keep the battery on charge but allow it to run flat at least once a week). If I am not using the device constantly, just checking the device twice an hour and answering calls, using 3G and Push, I can rely on a full working day of 10 to 12 hours between charges. If I turn on WiFi this drops to 6 or 7 hours. If I use the GPS without WiFi, autonomy drops to 4 or 5 hours. If I wanted to be really frugal and last a full 24 hours, I would need to turn off both Push email and 3G, and reduce screen brightness to a minimum.

For some people this is a major issue. For me, since I usually either have a PC on and can trail a USB cable, or spend the day driving with the iPhone hooked up as an iPod and being charged by the car, it is less of a constraint. But it remains an annoyance. I haven’t yet seen an iPhone equivalent of the Dell Latitude “Slice” – a battery “back pack” for the iPhone that could more than double autonomy with minimal extra thickness, but I assume that someone, somewhere, is working on an aftermarket device.

7. Document management
There is no equivalent of the Windows Mobile File Manager or Mac Finder on the iPhone so there is no way of manipulating file objects on device.

Admittedly the iPhone does a credible job of shielding you from the need to do any file level manipulation: For example the Camera has a photo album that is also accessible in other applications that need to access images (for example, the iBlogger application I use to write short articles on this site). But there are still occasions when you need to manipulate individual file objects.

One is during installation and set up when installing root certificates for SSL so that the device can talk to an Exchange server: Unless you use Apple’s enterprise deployment tool (which locks down the device and prevents further configuration changes, so not always desirable), the only ways to set up the device for Exchange are to set up a temporary IMAP account and download an attachment that you open, or to set up a website with the root certificate and define the appropriate MIME types on the web server (I could not get this to work, incidentally!). How much easier it would be to download the certificate onto the device using Windows explorer (connecting to a PC via USB exposes the devices memory as an attached storage device) and to be able to open the certificate file from memory on the iPhone.

The other key need for this functionality is when manipulating attachments on email messages. There is no way of saving attachments, or attaching documents selectively to a new or forwarded message.