We’ve all read and seen iPhone reviews. Even non-iPhone users could probably review the phone and point out its obvious pros and cons without messing with it too much. I’ve had my iPhone 3G[S] for nearly a month. Do I love it? Meh. It was exciting at first but the excitement is dying. However, I do like to take care of it to keep it looking sexy. I could go on and on about the pros of the phone but I think they’re all pretty obvious, so I’m going to go into the flaws I’ve found over the past month. I should mention that initially I was thinking of buying an N97 but after seeing the unboxing, it was rather unimpressive. Someone said it best with: “Once you get past the N97’s new home screen, you’re back in Symbian hell”. The main reason to switch is its simplistic UI. I was sick of performing so many steps on my N95 for simple tasks. Anyway, let’s begin:

Flash (in more ways than one)

No doubt Adobe Flash is a widely adopted interactive web technology. It’s been around since the 90’s and powers most of the video that you see online. Since day one, Apple has  said that Flash is coming. Adobe developed it and apparently the submission was shot down by Apple for draining the battery. This saga has gone back and forth several times and to this day Flash still hasn’t made it into Mobile Safari, nor is there any decent way of hacking it in with a jailbroken iPhone.

Lack of a camera flash leaves the new and improved 3.2MP Auto Focusing camera useless in imperfect light situations. Photos look grainy and dark. Even in good-ish situations, pictures are more grainy than they should be. The camera sucks compared to its competitors. Nokia’s cameras are now up to the 8MP range with a decent Xenon flash and Carl Zeiss lens. Unfortunately, the operating system and form factor in Nokia’s devices just isn’t there and they seem to be going in the wrong direction.

Oh, and that front facing camera? Nonexistent. Fortunately, that doesn’t bother me too much. I never used 3G video chats and I don’t really have much use for it, but Skype/iChat video calls may be sort of useful?

User Interface Inconsistencies

The iPhone is praised for its excellent User Interface. The simplistic and its multitouch screen is fairly intuitive, but if you look at some of the implementations, they’re just down right silly. Sometimes you swipe to delete, sometimes it’s tap to delete. Sometimes you can switch to landscape mode, sometimes you’re suck in portrait mode. The Calendar icon on Springboard updates every day but the Weather icon does not. Apparently it’s 23 and Sunny every day! I guess I’m nitpicking here but I feel that some of the features of the iPhone are hidden behind inconsistencies or unexplained touch gestures.

For example, the Maps application. How do you get to Street View? Sometimes the “little orange man button” is unavailable. Why? Because your pin isn’t EXACTLY on top of the road. You’d have to drop a pin on your location THEN enter street view. The new Compass feature in Maps requires you to tap the Location button twice. How is this feature indicated to the user? I wouldn’t have known about it if I hadn’t watched the WWDC keynote. Maybe it’s in the manual somewhere, but who reads them?!

Landscape mode is incredibly inconsistent. I hear 3.0 added landscape mode to a lot of the native applications but I still find it to be inconsistent. I personally find it essential for me to type faster as two thumbs makes it way easier to type however, I’ve also heard of users that can’t stand landscape. The N95 enabled landscape mode in every application. Applications on the N95 didn’t have to specifically support it, but could optimize for it if they wished. I guess this may make the user experience less desirable, but I hate having to rotate my phone every few seconds. Not to mention the incredibly insensitive accelerometer. Trying to get the phone to specifically turn from landscape to portrait is often a frustrating task.

Settings for Applications are also all over the place. Some are located in the official Settings App, some in the application itself. If you forget to check the either you often miss out on a ton of features.

Grip / Scratches

The back of the iPhone is incredibly slippery. I feel this thing is always about to slip out of my hands and land a giant scratch on the screen. Many were disappointed that the rumored mate back for the 3GS didn’t happen and I can certainly see why. The back scratches extremely easily even when handling the phone with care. I’ve gone to the effort to ensure I’ve never put the phone in my pocket with keys and coins but alas, it’s still scratched. The screen however, has no scratches whatsoever (and it gets fondled far more often). The oleophobic screen seems to certainly help wipe ear grease off the screen with a simple wipe on your pants, maybe that’s helping with the scratches too?

The form factor is also unnatural. It looks great but feels so awkward in your hand. To operate it you really need two hands (one holding and other hand as a finger(s) stylus) unless you have really big hands. If you do happen to use one hand, swiping your thumb from left to right often results in thumb cramps. Maybe I just haven’t got the leet skillz yet. Landscape mode, one hand, impossible.

Getting Work Done

I’m one that does a lot on their phone. Remote desktop, SSH, Mail, RSS, IM, Gaming, Music, the lot. I’ve had the phone for less than a month and I already have 9 pages of Apps. Getting work done on this phone isn’t easy, and there’s several reasons why:

Springboard organization sucks. 9 pages of Apps and no categorization makes it hard to navigate efficiently. The 3.0 update brings Spotlight-like Search which allows you to launch an Application by typing its name. It is the only way of getting around your unorganized clump of applications. If you do happen to need to browse applications, you’ll spend a lot of time organizing the applications on each page. You’ll be frustrated by the fact that moving an application around the Sprinboard can randomly move other applications if you don’t perform the finger gesture perfectly. Not to mention, syncing and backing up your phone does not save the positions of your Applications on the Springboard. For example, if you you need to do a Restore, iTunes will sync  just about everything except the way you organized your Springboard. Re-placing your Apps on the Springboard, when you have a lot, is time consuming. This is one area with simplicity is not always best.

Joshua Topolsky from Engadget wrote an excellent article stating why the iPhone sucks for doing work. It basically comes down to:

  • A crappy touch keyboard
  • Too many notifications
  • No background tasks

If I’m working in a Remote Desktop application I shouldn’t have to cut my connection, head back to the Springboard, find the other application I need, head back to the Springboard, open up the original application and reconnect. I should be able to switch between them with some sort of task switcher. But what about Backgrounder for jailbroken iPhones? Sure. It solves part of the problem, but it doesn’t solve the excessive amount of time I have to spend going in and out of Springboard to get to other applications.

Notifications for the iPhone often interrupt what you’re doing, and again, you must sever the connection in your current application to open the application that issued the notification…and then back again. Complicated much? Backgrounding isn’t even a necessity here. Perhaps a way to access often used applications without having to head back to the Springboard every time would be a good enough solution

The lack of an accessible file system also makes it hard to get things done. You can’t save files from say… Mail, then use it in another application such as, QuickOffice (a Word/Excel document editor). Applications are sandboxed to ensure one application can’t access another’s data. Sure, that can be great for security, but it significantly hinders your efficiency to get things done and share data, like attachments and such, between applications. No USB storage is also a bit of a bummer but overcome by the fact that you can use ad-hoc wireless networks and SSH to grab files off your device. What ever happened to To-Do List Exchange syncing? Sigh.

Oh, and battery life. It sucks. 4-5 hours of normal to heavy use. 6 if you’re lucky. It can barely make it throughout the day, which currently has me looking at battery pack cases. Standby time? Excellent, 12 hours of standby drains about 8-10%. Do the math.

The App Store / iTunes

Is full of junk Apps. No doubt there is some excellent gems in the store but they are usually hidden behind stupid soundboard-farting applications or bubble wrap popping games. Free applications are often filled with advertising unless you fork out money for the “ad-free” / “pro” version. Can you really believe there’s a “pro” version of the Bubble Wrap game?! Or that the “More Cowbell” application costs $1.99?! You’ve got to be kidding me right? Those ads in the “free” / “lite” versions make the sexy iPhone UI… unattractive. Some of the better applications are priced ridiculously. $30 for a Remote Desktop application? I think not. In the end, you’re probably going to be spending about $100+ on top of your original iPhone costs to get the features you really want, legitimately.

Not to mention there’s no trial apps. You have to trust the sometimes misleading application description that has been placed there by the developer. Or just pirate it. All hail Appulous.

I used to be an iTunes hater and to an extent, I still am. I hate how it’s a memory hog and launches 3 or 4 background applications just to do its thing however, I was impressed by its ease of use, sorta. It will never handle my music library (Windows Explorer ftw) as I refuse it to add cover art or touch my ID3 tags of my original files. I found a few things that bugged me in iTunes:

  • When tagging music: sometimes tracks don’t appear as part of an album as they aren’t tagged correctly. Fair enough, but you can’t drag that track into the album like you could with Zune. You have to manually edit the tag. Such effort.
  • XP x64 isn’t supported! You can apply some hacks and get it mostly working, but if you need Recovery or DFU mode, you’ve gotta move to a supported OS.
  • Now, I’m not sure if it’s because I’m using an unsupported OS but the UI can often be laggy. Clicking on a section or button can render the application unresponsive for 2-3 seconds. This often results in a click-fest and iTunes opening a NEW window for the section you wanted, without switching to the section on the main window. I guess it might be hard to understand the frustration in this unless it happens to you.

Vodafone? Or is it Bluetooth Tethering?

I went with Vodafone for Visual Voicemail. Yes, I said it, voicemail. I hardly use the feature but my state of mind at the time was “well, I may as go with someone that unlocks all the capabilities of my new phone”. Three were out of the question due to their excessive roaming data charges and me being on the border of a 3G zone. Optus charged excessively for their tethering options and Telstra’s offerings were excessively priced.

At my house I often get “No Service” and I find that 3G coverage can be patchy. Maybe patchy is a bad description, it’s more like “no 3G when you think there should be 3G”. Disappointing. Though, I hear I can enable national roaming to roam to Telstra’s network and calls still be included in my cap, which I may enable (data not included :/).

However, that’s not the problem I want to express. I’m not sure if I can blame Vodafone on this issue, yet. I do use XP x64, which is unsupported, and I may very well have some dodgy Bluetooth drivers, but Internet access over Bluetooth tethering is practically non existent and I can’t figure out why. ICMP pings to sites work perfectly and in a timely manner but loading a webpage or connecting to MSN shows HUGE delays or complete unresponsiveness. A brief inspection with Wireshark showed that packets were often being retransmitted which I believe is the cause of the problem. I am yet to try USB, so I can’t blame Vodafone, yet, but if it is Vodafone, I am one sad-panda. I should note that website loading on the actual phone is very responsive (and I’m sure they’re both using the same APN), so I’m not sure what’s up. I should also note that my N95 worked perfectly over Bluetooth as a modem, however, this is Bluetooth as a Personal Area Network. Maybe something’s going on there. Will test more later.

And finally…Accelerometer Gaming

One of the first games that was showcased by Apple and used the accelerometer was SEGA’s Super Monkey Ball. A game where you guide a monkey, in a ball, to collect bananas while avoiding obstacles by tilting your phone. Cool game. There’s also Time Crisis, the good ol’ arcade shooter by NAMCO, ported to the iPhone. Tap to shoot and tilt to reload. Both are excellent games with a huge flaw: They refuse to take your current holding position of the iPhone as the “center” for the accelerometer. What do I mean by that? Both games assume that you’re holding your iPhone at a particular angle and to calibrate the accelerometer, they often ask to place your iPhone on a flat surface, faced up.This is all well and good if you’re sitting normally and have the screen titled optimally but if you’re laying down or in a different position it often leads to frustration.

In the case of Super Monkey Ball, you often find yourself moving backwards because the most comfortable position for yourself conflicts with its calibration, or vice versa, you find yourself tilting the screen away from you so that you can’t even see what the hell is going on in the game. Problem is that the game refuses to calibrate unless they’re on a flat surface or even worse, has absolutely no calibration options. A huge let down for games with extremely fun potential.

Overall? I feel like my N95 can still “do more” even if it may be through a convoluted UI. I would not buy “iPhone 4.0″. Android, WinMo 7 and Maemo are certainly looking good. Unfortunately, even at 3.0, the phone still needs homebrew applications. And until I think of more….I’m done here.

Edit: Oh yeah, FM Radio. I sort of give up there. There’s an excellent application called Wunder Radio which lists practically all your stations as web streams using Location services. Pretty cool. You can also get add-ons from Griffin Technology that plug in and add the functionality but I think Internet radio and Backgrounder will do as a substitute to FM Radio.