Celso Martinho

10 things I hate about the iPhone...

Posted on Sep 8, 2007

…that most people don’t mention.

  1. It has no frakng 801.2X support. This means no corporate Wifi and in no transparent authentication in some public Wifi networks.

  2. Again public Wifi networks. I think Apple should look into this carefully because it’s all about ease of use and commodity. What’s the point on having a gorgeous transition between GPRS/EDGE and Wifi if I’ll be stuck in a crippled Hotspot HTML page to logon ? The Wifi alliance has some recommendations for smart clients (using meta information on the hotstop webpages) to automate the authentication process. You should look into this.

  3. No .mac sync services. Finally a chance to give some meaning to a worthless service, but no, nothing. So much connectivity in a device and you still have to use the damned cradle to sync.

  4. No vcard support in smses. Worse, if a vcard is received it goes straight to /dev/null. I can’t even see the garbage. It just doesn’t happen nor I’m notified.

  5. Bluetooth sucks big time. Nothing but a bluetooth 2.0 headset is useful with an iPhone.

  6. Magic. I hate magic. MobileMail.app likes it. Can I please please setup an account without SSL and have you not auto-magically try to use it and have me go through the enormous network timeouts before I can hit “save settings” ? thanks.

  7. MobileSafari (and Safari 3) should have an API for offline storage and offline operations. It’s a must.

  8. The iTunes being progressively transformed into a media center causes me some confusion I must say. It aggregates my Music, my videos and now it substitutes the good old iSync for apple devices. Enough of this, I understand that Steve is having an hard trying to figure the new “i” ecosystem in OSX but while you don’t turn iTunes into iFace or iMedia please try and keep some consistency between your options. For instance, iTunes let’s me choose which photo albums I wan’t in my iPhone but it doesn’t sync back my camera photos into iPhoto. I have to load iPhoto to do that. Seems odd to me.

  9. MobileCalendar.app uses my iCal subscriptions as static events, so they’re not really live until the cradle comes along.

  10. MobileMail.app doesn’t have IMAP-IDLE. I guess this one is up for real soon though. The need for a permanent TCP connection will also probably require Apple to rethink the EDGE/GPRS/WIFI auto-transition thing. Also having MobileMail.app running constantly in memory may not be the best of options, some kind of middle agent may be needed I’m guessing. Also it seems that for technical reasons I can’t explain HSDPA is best suited for this than the GPRS radio. However I must say that I live just fine with polling. Works much better than I expected, even with a gigantic mailbox like mine.

  11. I cannot use the iPhone as an USB external disk drive. It has no disk mode like my good old 2G ipod (which I can boot OSX from, using firewire).

..just so you don’t keep saying I’m love blinded by the iPhone’s amazing features.