General Gripes

·         iPhone apps tend to freeze up, and they do not open instantly.  It’s true.  When you tap on an application, it will animate open immediately but it will then freeze while the real application – and any associated data - loads.  This can take anywhere from half a second to 3 seconds.  Things as simple as the alarm clock application have to load.  To make things worse, there is no wait cursor – e.g. an hourglass, spinning circle, etc. – and so you can’t tell whether the current application is frozen or not without tapping on it.  This of course can cause unintended commands to be executed, etc.  iPhone apps – the Mail application in particular – can also freeze up while processing tasks, with no visual indication of whether the app is busy.

·         The iPhone’s battery life is not very good.  Browsing the web with Safari in 3G eats the batteries.  It is quite easy to drain the battery completely in just a few hours of off-and-on use, like one might see while travelling or attending a heavy series of back-to-back meetings.

·         The iPhone has extensive media capabilities, but like many other phones, uses headphones for this purpose.  The problem is that this means you need to carry headphones with you.  This is not a problem with an iPod because you simply keep the wired headphones plugged in all the time and probably even wrap the wires around the iPod itself.  But the iPhone is a phone, and also an Internet device.  Chances are, most of the time you won’t’ be listening to music on it.  It is obviously not convenient to be sending email with unused headphones plugged in (unless you want to become one of those people who always seem to be wearing headphones, regardless of whether they are actually listening to anything).  This means that you will be unplugging headphones when you don’t need them, and plugging them in when you do need them – and carrying headphones separately.  For women who carry purses this will probably be less of an issue, but for everyone else it means that if you want to use the iPhone to play music you will need to carry the disconnected headphones around with you.  Admittedly this is not really specific to the iPhone but it is an ongoing problem with media phones, and it is not ideal.

·         There is no email delete confirmation when in the single email viewing screen, and there is no confirmation for the cancel button in the email composition window.  In fact, the iPhone in general does not have much, if any, confirmation screens.  This is really annoying.  Because  this is a mobile touch screen, if one is in the process of going through, say, airport security, it is easy to accidentally press a button.

·         The camera does not support taking videos.  Even cheap phones have the ability to take videos.

·         The AppStore is a disorganized mess.  Although it does have categories and search, it is still not very browseable.  Most categories have a very large number of items in them, and you cannot sort the lists.  Categories do not have subcategories.  The store would benefit greatly from an Amazon model, where when one clicks on a top-level category they are presented with all the items in the category, and further sub-categories which will filter the results.  User-controlled sorting would also help a lot – sorting for example by rating, or popularity.  The store should have built-in support for free demos.  Some apps have a free demo version, usually called “Appname Lite” but there are no links between the full fledged version of the app and the Lite version.

App Store 

Conclusion

We’ve taken a first look at some of the issues and problems – the gripes – we have with the iPhone 3G as it stands today.  Many of these issues could be fixed with a software patch, so there is hope.  Many of these issues are serious enough that one might expect them to be fixed quickly, although that could be wishful thinking. 

The most successful smart phone currently available, of course, is the BlackBerry.  Available in many versions, and respected for its business-quality reliability, it is the gold standard – and market leader – against which the iPhone must be judged.  At the moment, many of these issues –particularly those related to stability and the Mail application – prevent the iPhone from being 100% reliable.  If your main concern is sending email and making phone calls, then you will probably be better off with a BlackBerry.  If you want more features, exciting industrial design, and don’t mind the occasional crash or lost email composition then you should go for the iPhone.

Stay tuned for Part II of this review in which we take a detailed look at what is good about the iPhone 3G and complete the picture.