Monday, January 26, 2009

iPhone irritants

I love my iPhone. Really I do. It's so much better than my recent Palm offerings and miles better than any "feature" phone I've ever used. But there's a few things that really annoy me.

Tonight for example, I was speaking to someone and after the call finished I wanted to send them details of another contact by SMS. Can you do it? No. The iPhone doesn't support vCards, and it certainly doesn't allow you to send anything remotely as useful as a number or email by SMS like just about every other phone on the planet can. Where are Apple coming from here? SMS is a huge technology, but Apple don't appear to like it (much) and would much rather you sent everything by email - of course that assumes that everyone has email and acceses it all the time. Well maybe in America Stevie, but not here.

So here you have a current, and arguably one of the market leading "smartphones" in use today, and if I want to send details of one of my contacts via SMS, I've got to go to the contact, get a piece of paper, write down all the details on the paper (because I won't remember them - especially if I want to send email and any other details as well as a number) and then type it into the SMS app (why do they have that single line text entry field when you've got a screen as big as that?). This, to my mind is really crass and short sighted. And what makes it worse, is the protectionism they then demonstrate by not opening up the SDK to allow 3rd part developers to build what Apple should have made available in the first place. It all made me get my Centro out of the drawer and lovingly show the blasted iPhone how it should be done.

A couple of other irritants are to do with the calendar, and no ability to use categories or make appointments private. The latter is a particualrly annoying one for me because I sync with my work Exchange, and I don't wish anyone at work (an organisation of almost 800 people who all have access to each other's calendars) to see what I'm up to in my personal life.

OK rant over.

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