The (Little) Things I Hate About The iPhone

I’ve had an iPhone 3Gs for a few weeks now and absolutely love it. It has increased my productivity immensely and made the miserable experiences I’ve had with phones, both smart and well non-smart, all but forgotten. In fact, I’m writing this post using the wordpress application and have one for Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other of my networking needs (desires).

However, the iPhone is far from perfect and I thought I’d share a few pesky nuances here to see if anyone has any solutions, shared my gripe, or merely felt pity for my geeky self. This is my first iPhone so maybe others have had the same complaints, but then again maybe they haven’t.

Organizing Icons and Pages
I like to keep different pages of applications for different reasons. For example, my homescreen has my main utilities as well as social networking and blogging needs while I have seperate ones for news, games, and misc. apps like yelp. The iPhone makes it difficult to rearrange the order of pages without manually moving each app individually. Which also shows the need to move multiple icons easier.

The Camera
There are a few things that I simply don’t understand about the camera functionality, for example, why aren’t PhotoBooth effects built into the iPhone? More importantly, why separate the ‘Camera’ and ‘Photos’ application? It seems quite redundant and I think combining the two intuitively is not that unfeasible since you can get to your photos via the ‘Camera’ app regardless.

Although taking photos in either landscape or protrait mode is perfectly fine, taking video is not. Taking a video in portrait mode seems quite silly given that it will leave two black bars or cut off the top and bottom of any video when played on your average widescreen TV or monitor. If you can think of a practical use of a portrait video then let me know.

Speaker and Headphones
I’ve always hated Apple headphones and unfortunately no improvements have been made in this department. My hands continuously reach up to keep the buds in my ears while walking around the city making me look like a CIA agent with an earpiece. The sound quality isn’t the best but it’s not awful if you are lucky enough to get the buds in properly. The remote that comes dangling on the headphones is also pretty lousy. Sure, volume control and play/pause work fine but what about next/previous track! Update: Just found out that two clicks is next track, three clicks is previous. Yes, I am an idiot.

The iPhone’s speakerphone could definitely be louder but what bothers me more is its positioning. While holding the iPhone in widescreen/landscape mode, especially needed when playing most games, my right hand has the tendency to cover the speakerphone which literally makes it inaudible. I don’t know where else Jonathan Ive could have placed the speaker and maybe this was the best compromise but it’s still not ideal.

Texting
The other day my girlfriend texted me asking me a simple question, “When will I be picking her up?”. The answer was obviously not simple and could not be restricted to 160 characters. Also, I was driving at the time and didn’t want to text and drive which is more dangerous than talking in my opinion. So I tried tapping her name furiously to call her but nothing happened. Instead, I pressed home, went to ‘Phone’, clicked on ‘Favorites’, and tapped her name. I used to have a Samsung phone that simply let me press the call button while looking at a text to dial the person – a feature that I really hope is incorporated in the iPhone soon.

More Little Things

• Shake to Shuffle is one of the stupidest features ever. Not only did it take me a few days to realize why my songs were changing while running down the subway steps but if I were to actually use it as intended an accident is guaranteed. Think Wii remote in LCD TV size accident.
• Shake to Undo is quite strange too but I couldn’t come up with a better alternative.
• Depending on which way you turn the iPhone to go into landscape mode the volume buttons on the side should correspond accordingly instead of being fixed.
• Battery life is really a waking days worth of about 14 to 16 hours depending on your use. This probably isn’t Apple’s fault entirely – they simply built a device that makes you want to do ALOT of browsing, downloading, streaming, playing, listening, watching, typing, tapping, and other things that drain modern batteries.
• I still have no idea why I can’t create or edit playlists directly on the iPhone.

Tagged as: Apple, gadgets, iPhone, Technology