iPhone - the darker cloud
I don’t take any pleasure in writing negative reviews. I’ve been using the iPhone for two weeks now, replacing my Treo 700, and I have discovered more things that I don’t like than those that I do. I’ll share some of them with you.
The iPhone has a lovely interface for Contacts, the scrolling rubber band feel is great. However, there is no way to search. On my Treo I could enter a partial bit of info, like an area code, and have it search everything in Contacts. Or some snippet of text I knew was in the Notes field. The only way to access my over 1000 Contacts is by scrolling a list of either All or a Group from my Addressbook. This is a frustrating limitation after having the ability to search on anything. My memory is not good enough to remember all the info in my Contacts by firstname or lastname.
The Calendar is another place where I feel the other side of the blade - beautiful, simple, clean interface - no customization, no view preferences, no modification. The text is large and takes up much of the large screen. The Month view is useless to me - I get three lines of events after selecting a date. All the dates have a dot indicating they have events since my calendar is generally full enough to have something on every day, thus this indicator is rendered useless. List view is the fastest to use but I often find myself staring at a day and not having a contextual indicator for how far away it is, thus I mix up weekends. The Calendar needs to have a Settings option to change font size, at the very least.
Mail. Sigh. I had high hopes for this. I’ve tried playing with the preferences to improve readability. The ideas are good and all the pieces are there but… I still find it lacking. Even though I am using POP to get my email from GMail I still run into abysmally long pauses when I am not connected to a network. I have set the summary lines from 1 to 4 to avoid having to open the messages since it will want to make another connection for that but it often doesn’t fully load the summaries. I’ve tried it at 25 messages per screen all the way up to 200 (preload?) but it doesn’ t matter. In trying to delete messages I end up opening them 25% of the time. I was happy to find I could reduce the font size, which I did, then unhappy to find I could not flip for sideways viewing - handy for reading html messages. There is no email synchronization with Exchange.
There’s no ToDo or Tasks. And, yes, you can use a web-enabled version but they are anemic.
The Notepad is pathetic. It syncs with nothing. Why would I put anything there?
The Weather does not allow drilling to more detailed descriptions - like the forecast.
The Camera has no zoom and no video. Nice resolution though, but with the Treo having these features for years now I don’t understand the lack in the iPhone.
There is no system-wide search of the data in the phone. Looking for something you remember seeing, was it email or web? Search bookmarks, history, email, notepad, addressbook, calendar? Nope.
Bottom line: I’m disappointed. I’m seriously considering going back to my Treo.
[Aug24] New complaints:
iPhone syncs with iCal. iCal has beautiful color coded multiple calendars. You can sync them through iTunes. BUT, in the iPhone you lose the color coding - so all the entries have no context. I have no idea what belongs to my calendar, my wifes, or my departments! Argh.
When receiving a call on the iPhone you have one interface option - Slide to Answer. There is no visible way to Ignore or Send to Voicemail. Pressing the only other interface object, the round button does nothing. Though the sleep/power button does work to silence the call. If you go out and Google you’ll find that mysteriously if you press the sleep/power button twice it will send it to voicemail. Now that’s a transparent interface.
August 24th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Now that two of you have the iPhone has Craig kept to his praise or are you both finding the same frustrations. This was a very interesting review to read and I have to admit I would think twice after reading it….and I really want an iPhone. Hhm
September 29th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Ok- so I’ve had the iphone for 3 weeks or so, and thought it was time for me to weigh in.
I think you’re happiness with it is completely related to how you need to use your phone. I upgraded from an old LG phone that had no camera, no
email, and no web capabilities, and limited space for storage of contacts.
After I first got the phone everyone was asking how I liked it, and I remained reserved, but now I think I’ll say that I am very happy with it and would recommend it.
Of course the first pro is that it has a really cool interface for all the applications! The phone works well- I get better coverage than I did with Verizon- and the voicemail feature is awesome.
I can check email (thank to IT for setting up the gmail account to forward everything to my iphone) anytime I am not at my computer, which is really handy if I am waiting to hear back about something but am working on the floor or in production and can’t get to my computer easily. The keyboard for email, & text is very easy to use- way quicker than the old style phones. I also love having a camera always available- although it doesn’t zoom, the clarity is great-
Only real downside I found was more of an inconvenience with my contacts- even with IT’s help and going to the AT& T store to get my contacts downloaded off my old phone (contacts are on my phone that are NOT in outlook) there was no way to transfer those so I have a 7 page list of the contacts in my old phone that I am still working on adding to my outlook contacts so it will sync with the phone. I don’t use my computer to check my calendar now on a daily basis- so that’s not a downside for me.
I don’t have my phone bill from Italy yet- so we’ll see how that turns out- but it worked well as a phone while I was there, and I just avoided using any data (like email or web), and now there is an upgrade that let’s you turn off the data so you don’t have to be as concerned about the $1,000 potential phone bills…
In my opinion it’s a very functional and user friendly upgrade from a regular phone- and I have gained a lot broader spectrum of resources to use when I’m not at my computer- and I’ll use my computer for things that are more complex.