Kardinal Virtues

(Really, 18 things that don’t suit me personally about the iPhone)
(aka 3,000 words more about the iPhone than was really necessary)

The next five paragraphs are background on me and what I use my mobile device for. While they are useful background, if you don’t care and just want to skip to the list, skip down to the part where the numbers start.

So I stood in line for nearly 5 hours to buy an iPhone 3G on the Tuesday after release. I don’t regret this decision, as I enjoyed meeting the people around me and talking to them about all kinds of things, few of them iPhone related. And now that I have an iPhone, I am getting enormous satisfaction from the entertainment value it brings. Because let’s face it, this is a consumer device, not a business device. I like it because it’s fun, not because it’s useful.

For the last 5 years, I have carried a Windows Mobile (WinMo) device. First an HTC Wizard (T-Mobile called it the MDA), then an HTC Apache (masquerading as a Sprint PPC 6700), both with slide-out hardware keyboards. They’re good, well-made devices that served me well in my business needs. But they’re Windows, with all the badness that comes along. They’re unstable, slow, unstable, have small screens, unstable, buggy, and unstable. Did I mention unstable? One friend gave up on WinMo when he had to reboot his phone all too often just to make a phone call. I admit this happened to me a number of times, until I hacked it. I was able to make mine a good deal faster and more stable when I hacked it up (using Kitchens, if you know the tech) to only load the programs I wanted, as opposed to the dreck that T-Mobile and Sprint wanted to foist on me, and to load it in ROM, not RAM. But this was still not an elegant solution by any means.

I am an IT Manager, and I have three MCSE’s (NT, 2000, and 2003). I run two mostly Microsoft-based networks of over 200 systems, running Exchange for our email, so I’ve been hooked into EAS on WinMo for years. My personal calendar is right there with my work calendar on Exchange, my personal Contacts stored on work’s Exchange server, and I put in pretty long hours to make sure our network runs smoothly. Simply, I take pride in my work, and try to do the best I can at it. My work is strongly integrated into my life, and this is reflected in my mobile device.

So my WinMo device worked very well for me all those years. It fit my needs because it integrated both together. But make no mistake, WinMo comes to the table as a business device first, and a consumer device second. There’s a built in MP3 player, but it’s not very good. It can run a few videos, but poorly. It streams almost nothing. Getting YouTube videos on it requires some pretty significant work. But it does business beautifully. WinMo has integrated Office document support for both reading and writing, it puts your calendar and agenda right on the home page, its calendar support is very Exchange-oriented, with the ability to make meetings from your mobile device.

So switching to an iPhone has been a tough experience for me. Part of my difficulty, I’m sure, has been that I’m used to doing things a certain way. I know when I switched from a Blackberry to a WinMo device, it took some adjustment, and I know that adjusting to the way the iPhone does things is going to be part of this adjustment as well. But what I’m coming to realize is that Apple likes for you to do things Apple’s way. You can see this in all of their products, but particularly in the iPhone. There aren’t nearly the number of options and preferences for behavior that you see in WinMo, and there’s serious limitations in creating additional options. That said, I also know that Apple’s overriding philosophy and objective is to give the user a smooth and simple experience, and sometimes you have to sacrifice options for that.

But I still have issues with the iPhone. I’m not ready to return it yet…I have until August 14th to do that, but I’m struggling with that decision. I’m putting this list out there partly to share my experiences, and partly in the hopes that others have solutions to some of these issues.

The list is sort of a “Things WinMo did better” as well, since that’s my primary basis for comparison. Without further ado, this list is in approximately priority order.

1. Battery life – 3G sucks batteries like an oil executive in a Hummer limousine. My first day I had it, I left 3G on all day, just like I did my old Sprint 6700, and it was at 20% after 5 hours. That’s just unacceptable. I’ve learned to leave 3G off unless I am surfing and don’t have WiFi available, but I shouldn’t have to delve 4 menus deep to turn it on and off when needed.

2. No Remote Desktop – As an IT manager, I sometimes have to remotely control my servers to address issues after hours. With my WinMo device, I could do this directly from my phone, albeit slowly and on a tiny screen. I understand that Apple doesn’t want to encourage the use of Windows systems, but the lack of RD client is a big blow to me. Now if there’s an issue at work when I’m out with my friends, I have to find a PC somewhere to resolve it.

3. Switching email from personal to work takes 4 clicks – This drives me nuts. I have my personal mail on my iPhone as well, and to switch from Work to Personal mail takes 4 clicks. On my WinMo device, it was one button. ONE.

4. Mail does not pop up – Email on my WinMo device would pop up, on arrival, taking up the lower third of the screen, with the subject line and who it was from. No such luck on an iPhone. This makes (3) even worse. Now, if I get an email, I get a small sound and vibrate, and I have to stop what I’m doing to find out if it’s my VP asking why they can’t do whatever on the network, or just another potentially interesting but probably not email from TechRepublic. And if I last had my email application in Personal, I have to click 4 times to get back to Work. Not good.

5. No calendar on home page – I’m not an extremely busy guy, but I have my share of appointments, sometimes many in a day. My WinMo device would plaster my calendar for the day on the home page, where I could stay aware of what’s coming up today. On the iPhone, I have to CHECK my Calendar, it doesn’t create awareness for me. This is mostly a behavioral change for me, but a significant one.

6. No snooze of calendar items – When a calendar reminder, which I live by, comes up, I can’t snooze it at all. On WinMo, not only could I snooze it, I could snooze for about 10 different options, from “5 minutes before event” to “4 days from now”. With iPhone, I can view or cancel. That’s it.

7. No Cut and Paste – Some have challenged whether this is needed, but I use it regularly. The example I’ve given is that I get an email from someone, and want to create a meeting about the topic, so I copy and paste the contents of the email into the meeting request. This example isn’t that relevant anymore, now that I know you can’t invite anyone to a meeting via the iPhone anyway!

8. Calendar doesn’t permit creation of “Private” items – As I said above, my calendar is integrated on my Exchange Server; both personal and work items are on there, so I don’t have to check multiple calendars. But I also don’t need my co-workers to see that I’m going to my family reunion on Saturday or my appointment for my physical on Tuesday. So I mark them “Private”, indicating I’m busy, but they don’t need to know why. Can’t create these from the iPhone. Thankfully, you can edit them in Outlook to be private. But now I have to remember that when I get back to the office, I have to edit the follow-up to my physical to be Private.

9. Setting night mode requires too many manual settings – Notifications are important to me (the next 4 items are all about them), as I need to stay aware of what’s going on with my network. On WinMo, I could use various programs that created profiles for Work, Home, Church, Movies, and Night. The Blackberry is the best at this. For the iPhone, I have to drill down 3 menus deep and change 6 settings manually before I go to bed. I want to hear SMS sounds (it’s how we are notified of server problems), but not email, but I need to phone calls (user emergencies), but not voice mail or calendar, etc, etc. Too much work every night.

10. Can’t use custom SMS sounds – As I mentioned above, SMS is how we are notified of server issues, so I need a sound that GRABS my attention no matter what I am up to. The SMS sounds on the iPhone are pathetically bad at this; they grab almost no attention at all. And worst, I can’t change them to something I like and use. I can add ringtones easily; why not SMS sounds?

11. Can’t Change Email sound, much less use custom sound – See (10). But this time, I don’t even get a choice. Apple tells me “This is the sound of email; live with it”. Grrrrrrr.

12. Can’t turn off gravity-detector if I’m lying down – I like to read my news in the morning in bed as I wake up. But the iPhone makes me sit up, because if I’m on my side reading the news…the news is sideways! With now way to turn it off. Thankfully I have a workaround for this, the AP “Mobile News” application, but not for Google Reader, which I’ve been using more and more.

13. Can’t create meeting and invite others – If I want to organize a meeting from my phone, which I did a good number of times on my WinMo device, I quite simply can’t. There’s no way to invite people from the iPhone…at all.

14. Hard to take notes quickly – On my WinMo device, if it was all I had with me, I could take notes, brief and hard to read, by writing on my phone screen with my stylus. The only way to input data into the iPhone is via the keyboard, and it’s just not fast enough in some cases. Nor, BTW, was my WinMo’s keyboard, so it’s not a matter of just adjusting to the keyboard.

15. Two handed operation: one to hold, one to navigate – using the iPhone is almost always a two-handed operation, at least currently. The scroll slider on my WinMo device (and the scroller on the Blackberry before that) would let me scroll on a screen one-handed. I haven’t figured out a comfortable way to scroll and hold the iPhone with one hand yet. This can be irritating sometimes.

16. Attachments download only when prompted – I have SIXTEEN GIGS HERE. Why does it want to wait until I tell it to download my voice mail WAV attachment (work or personal voice mail, not iPhone)? SIXTEEN GIGS. My WinMo device had 2GB in an SD card, I could tell it to download the attachments automatically.

17. Can’t Change Reminder/Calendar sound, much less use a custom sound – Again with the notifications. I’d just like something that would be better at getting my attention.

18. Gmail doesn’t let you use aliases – My personal email address, as any of my longtime friends can tell you, is my firstname at my lastname dot net, which I forward to wherever I check it, in this case, Gmail. And Gmail is wonderful because when I send from it, I can tell it I’m sending from my real email address…except on my iPhone. In an attempt to make things simple (see my point about Apple’s user philosophy above), they’ve removed the option to CLAIM you’re coming from another email address. My primary concern here is that I don’t want people to get it in their address book that I’m firstname dot lastname dot net at gmail dot com, and then if and when I decide to move on to the best email system of the second decade of the 21st century, they’re still emailing me at my old address. This has worked well for me in the past, as I’ve left a trail of abandoned email addresses scattered among six or seven email services on the ‘Net.

There are some things I thought I would hate but don’t. I’m pleasantly surprised that the following are not nearly as annoying as I thought they’d be:

- No physical keyboard. I’ve adjusted remarkably quickly. I’d still prefer it, but it’s not a problem to deal with the soft keyboard. Neat technology.

- Can’t turn off images for quick browsing. 3G and WiFi make this pretty much a non-issue.

- Applications costing money without previews or evaluation copies. The reviews seem to be sufficient on this point.

I have a host of other minor annoyances that I’d love solutions to, but they’re not big issues for me. So if you have a solution to synching to two iTunes causes my apps to be deleted, no word-wrap on pretty much anything I zoom in on, no horizontal keyboard, no MMS, slider to answer a phone is a stupid idea, notifications (email, SMS, calendar reminders) not repeating , password being limited to 4 characters and no more, no data encryption, calendar doesn’t color code by categories of personal or business, MP3 player is hard to fast forward accurately (no wonder they think 30 second ads work on podcasts; my car has a 10 second skip SUCKERS! ), no email priority indicator, notes are useless because they don’t synch, GSM transmissions interfering with amplified unshielded speakers, and there’s no SMS length counter…let me know!