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Below I list out my current gripes about the iPhone. I think this post was spurred a bit by the fact that I’m a little disappointed with Apple’s first major update to the iPhone software. The complaints are also informed by my experience of traveling in Asia with it. It really is handy for traveling. If you can get reliable wifi you can do quite a lot. I think the missing copy & paste sent me looking for a real computer more than anything.

Please notice how none of the complaints below include not having the ability to buy songs from the iTunes store when I’m sitting in Starbuck’s. How cute. Nor do they complain that I paid too much. Thanks for the $100 back (I’ll likely use it to buy the next iPhone version with GPS and video) but actually what’s going to have a more lasting effect on my impression of the iPhone is how long I have to cope with these software shortcomings. And will the next software release just add additional ways to buy things from Apple (and only Apple)? Or will it improve and refine my experience. And why even announce it if it’s not available yet? Is someone going to use that info in their purchasing decision? “I only want a device that I can purchase the currently playing song at Starbucks (a year from now when the service finally becomes available)?” Who cares. Is Leopard ready yet? Then shut up and release it, then you can tell me about your silly iTunes store application for iPhone.

Many of my gripes center around the fact that the iPhone seemed to be designed with the concept that the world is covered with free ubiquitous wireless data connections. That would be nice if it was true, but it’s not. AT&T’s EDGE data network is only a tiny step above dial-up and much less reliable. Many of the applications don’t perform well in the real world because of this. Caching on Safari, for instance. I still haven’t figured out the voodoo behind iPhone’s Safari caching strategy. You can’t set a cache size or effect the cache in anyway that I can find. There’s no way to save a web page so you can be sure you can view it off line. Hello, you are a mobile device, remember? The attitude seems to be “off-line? what’s that?” If I don’t have a valid data connection Safari frequently just shows me a blank page, instead of the page I looked at last time I loaded Safari. Particularly annoying for the javascript currency convertor I tried to use while traveling. It doesn’t actually need an internet connection and once I’ve downloaded the page, it would work fine except Safari on iPhone always tries to redownload the page whenever I open Safari, so if I do it where there’s no data connection, I get a blank page and a whinny message box. Mail is a tiny bit better but still many things that I needed and could have been cached weren’t. Get realistic. In the U.S. alone, nevermind the rest of the globe, there’s no way we’ll have such ubiquitous wireless data as to pretend that you don’t need to save things for offline viewing, certainly not before the end of the useful life of this hardware.

There needs to be a setting that allows you to use the cell phone without using the data connection. When I was on international roaming in Thailand the wifi I got was not very reliable. A number of times when I was trying to check my email over free wifi it would automatically fail over to the roaming GSM data connection that costs $.02/kb. What if someone accidentally downloaded a movie or something? It could cost them $1000. It would be nice if there was a way to ensure that the phone would not use the GSM data connection, while still having the phone active. Maybe it could ask you if you want to use new GSM data connections the same as it does for a new wifi connections. Updated Oct 28, 2007: The iPhone v1.1.1 software update that fixes this. You can now disable GPRS/EDGE connections when roaming internationally.

The calendar application is missing a bunch of integration functionality. If you put a location in a calendar event, you can’t click on that location to look it up in Google Maps. If you put a URL in the URL field of an event, you can’t click on the URL to open in Safari. You can’t click on phone numbers or URLs in an event description. So there’s effectively no way to associate a google map with an event. You can’t show and hide your various calendars, only choose which calendars sync with your iPhone. Once on the iPhone, all calendar events appear as if they were on one calendar, no color coding like on iCal. You can’t move an event from one calendar to another.

You can’t use the iPhone to send someone a contact. You can’t attach a contact to an email or transmit it in any way aside from reading it into someone’s voice mail. Lame! You can’t change which group a contact is in using your iPhone.

You can’t edit contact information unless you access it from the special “Contacts” section of the Phone application. Come on, that’s so annoying. If you access a contact via any other method, the edit button is missing. There’s plenty of space for the button, just no button. You have to then click on “Contacts” and then go hunt for the contact you were just looking at again so you can get an edit button this time. FIX ME. So annoying.

The weather application doesn’t show the local time for the place who’s weather you’re looking at. And for some reason I can’t put Bangkok in the weather widget no matter how I search for it. It also doesn’t cache the data well. If you look up the weather and then go someplace without wifi or data, it will try to connect and then whine about not being able to, then show you no data instead of the old data. Stale data is better than no data, imo.

You can’t use your iPhone to organize your music. You can’t adjust the genre of a song or any of the track details using your iPhone. It would be nice to be able to organize your music while killing time on the train, or fix a mistake when you see it. The touch interface would probably be an easier interface to do that with anyway than a mouse and a computer.

There’s no sound recording application. Why not? Come on, it’s just software. All the hardware is already there and most of the software with the Visual Voice Mail application. I want to be able to record voice notes or anything else that will fit on my memory.

You can’t sign in to YouTube with the YouTube application, so any favorites you make online or on your iPhone don’t sync don’t sync with each other. I can’t find videos I’ve posted online with the YouTube iPhone application. Dumb phone.

I wish there was a small LCD screen on the button/microphone of the headset. I love walking around and listening to music knowing I’m not going to miss a call because it comes through the headset. Except I usually end up taking the iPhone out of my pocket when I get a call to look and see who’s calling. If there was a small display on the microphone, you could see who’s calling, what song is playing, what time it is, etc. Or maybe it could just read their name to you in the headset.

It’s sometimes not super comfortable to hold to watch long movies. It’d be nice if there was a case that had a way to prop it up so you could put it on the tray table of an airplane. I ended up putting it in my lap which was fairly comfortable, just kind of odd to look down at the screen.

The iPhone should include a very small metal adapter that turns the headphone/mic jack into a normal headphone jack. The current cordy thing you can buy is annoying and bigger than it needs to be. Better yet would be just a software switch. I definitely like the mic on the headphone cord though. It just kinda sucked listening to Sublime on repeat cause I didn’t have the stupid adapter needed to play my music on my friend’s stereo.

When you watch a podcast on your iPhone and delete it to save space and then sync, the podcast still shows up as new in iTunes. If you have your preferences set to download “new” podcasts, it will re-download to your iPhone even though you already watched it and deleted. Dumb phone. I have the same problem with Front Row actually. Update: This also seems to work a bit better with v1.1.1.

I am also a little disappointed with Apple’s take on ring tones. So if I make my own ring tone, I have to pay Apple $.99 to use it? Huh? Why? Because everyone else does it? That’s stupid. I can take my own picture and use it as a desktop without paying Apple. Why should I pay them so I can decide what song I want to hear when it rings? And I can only use songs that Apple has deemed worthy of being able to play on their/my iPhone, which I’m guessing is only music you’ve purchase from them since none of my music seems to qualify. Screw you Apple. I’m not interested and this is starting to feel a little too Tandy for me. Are these the “security concerns” that prevent you from allowing other people to write software for it? Update: This tool gives you free ring tones.

That said, I still love my iPhone

I also rest assured that with any other phone I’ve come across I would never be so nit-picky because my list of compliants would be so ridiculously long that there’d be no point. “Start over” would be the basic point. Similarly I think the list of things that I’m pleasantly surprised by when using the iPhone is too long to keep track of. The predictive text input is pretty amazing sometimes. Everything that it’s designed to do generally works amazingly well and better than you had previously imagined it could. The touch interface is awesome and it would be hard to go back to a 4-way rocker switch after the iPhone. All things considered I’m still quite happy with it. Definitely still room for improvement though. I have my fingers crossed that Apple will correct all of these issues when Leopard is released.