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iPhone Not So Cool for Some

Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 11:35 AM - by

The flashy look and cool factor of the iPhone might have been great features in the beginning, but after a month of use, the Houston Chronicle's Dwight Silverman found that the combination iPod and smart phone's luster had worn off. Topping his list of complaints were email support, Web browsing, and Internet connectivity.

Mr. Silverman found the iPhone's Microsoft Exchange support to be lacking. "f your company uses Microsoft Exchange for its e-mail , you can forget about using the iPhone to get your business mail unless your systems folks are willing to turn on an older e-mail feature called IMAP," he said. "Many system administrators won't do this (including those at the Chronicle), leaving users in the lurch."

He also found the lack of support for "push" email that arrives in real time to be a problem, and wasn't pleased with the iPhone's new email notifications.

The Safari Web browser does offer an overall better experience than the browsers found on other handheld devices, but Mr. Silverman found that he had issues with JavaScript, and that some sites failed to function correctly. He also felt that the EDGE data network the iPhone uses was far too slow.

"If you can get to Wi-Fi with the iPhone, you'll want to do it, even if you have to beg, borrow or steal, because the Edge network is incredibly slow," he said.

Mr. Silverman also found the iPhone's on-screen keyboard to be lacking. He wasn't able to get proficient with the keyboard, and considered the predictive typing feature to be inferior to the offerings on most other smart phones.

The iPhone's price tag was a problem, too. At US$499 or $599, the device should offer far more than the 4GB or 8GB currently available.

In the end, Mr. Silverman went back to his familiar Samsung BlackJack. His advice: Wait for version 2.

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jbruni said:

member since 14 Jul 2006 with 105 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Jul 31, 2007 12:09 pm

IMAP is an "older" feature? Sort of like SMTP is, I guess. And TCP? Bah! That's ancient history.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Jul 31, 2007 12:10 pm

Wow, the whole thing's a problem! Seems like he's pretty much a fool if he bought something that has obviously been such a failure all around. I think he needs to go back to a pen and paper. Seems like the BlackJack may be too much to handle, too.

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geoduck said:

member since 30 Dec 2003 with 1922 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Jul 31, 2007 12:17 pm

jbruni wrote:
IMAP is an "older" feature? Sort of like SMTP is, I guess. And TCP? Bah! That's ancient history.

Yeah that was the part that I found oddest. IMAP is not an "old" technology in the sense of being archaic. IMAP is the standard. MS Exchange is the odd single vendor, proprietary system.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Jul 31, 2007 12:43 pm

Maybe old is the wrong word for it, but less feature rich is a better description. There are also a lot of other problems he did not mention that have been irking me to no end in the month that I've been using the iPhone. The lack of a clipboard is a glaring omission. You cannot email a link to someone from your iPhone without typing it in. So if you have a long link, you must memorize it and type it into an email with no predictive text at all since that will not work for URLs. It's funny that some iPod features have been removed from the iPhone. People point at no custom ringtones but you cannot use an mp3 or other audio file as an alarm, something you could do with the iPod. He's on point with the EDGE network, aside from very basic sites I find browsing the web useless on the EDGE network as I am usually not able to spend the amount of time needed to download the pages over it. Other glaring issues are you can only sync with one computer, you cannot sync notes, you cannot sync contact categories, standard headphones do not work with the iPhone, there's no file manager. Those are the big issues, but the overall fit & finish are just lacking. Edit buttons flip from the left to the right depending which app you are using, you cannot multiselect anything for easy batch deleting, the volume rocker works in the opposite direction of the on screen volume control, and so on. It appears as if Apple simply didn't have enough time to finish. I expect that many of these issues will be addressed as updates, but rather than furthering the device those updates are going to be more about catching up to where they wanted to be with the launch.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Jul 31, 2007 1:27 pm

You could just use the share button, on the screen to send the url from safari. I think the EDGE issue has a lot to do with where you live. In San Francisco it's fast enough to get by, I can check my main news sites with out waiting much. The sync is not as full featured as I'd like, but I'll take the slimmer profile and use different headphones. At least for me the volume works just as I would have expected. Up on the switch is louder, to the right on the screen is louder. I too am looking forward to updates.

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2088 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Jul 31, 2007 2:49 pm

Re: EDGE network: I'd guess that those complaining about how slow EDGE is must live in large cities. Check ATT's page for 3G availability. Here in Oregon, it's only in part of the Portland area. The rest of the state is without ATT 3G and probably will be for quite a while. There is no 3G access in Virginia (where I grew up) outside of the Washington, DC.

In fact, the places where I've lived most of my 60 years (including undergrad and grad school at MIT and 22 years in the US Air Force) do not yet have ATT 3G:

Roanoke, VA (18.5 yrs): NO

Cambridge, MA (6 yrs): YES

Dayton, OH (4 yrs): NO

Glendale, AZ (1.5 yrs): YES

Los Angeles, CA (4.5 yrs): YES

Annapolis, MD (6.5 yrs): NO

Santa Maria, CA (6 yrs): NO

Eugene, OR (13 yrs) NO

YES = 12 yrs

NO = 48 yrs

I doubt that I'm all that unusual. A 3G phone would, apparently, cost more and have shorter battery life. (Yes, I know that an ATT 3G phone would work on EDGE.) Why would I or much of the rest of the people in the US want to pay more and have shorter batery life so that we could use a network that we can't access?

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Jul 31, 2007 2:57 pm

I have had my iPhone for a month now, and there a couple of items I would like changed, but over all, I am very pleased. The speaker volume or the phone could be louder as could the ring volume. Like the other poster, your speed on EDGE is very dependent on where you are. I get very reasonable speed here in Birmingham,AL. However, I do have one gripe: everyone who compares the iPhone to a BlackBerry mentions storage. My iPhone holds more than 8 times the standard BB amount, and no, it does not have removable cards to lose. 8 Gigs is a huge amount of storage for a portable device. Finally, the iPhone is not meant to be a replacement for the BB. It is for the rest of us who would like connectivity where ever we are. If you cannot live without push e-mail, keep your BB. If you want the ultimate in personal anywhere connectivity, by all means get an iPhone.

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2088 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Jul 31, 2007 3:14 pm

Anonymous wrote:
IHowever, I do have one gripe: everyone who compares the iPhone to a BlackBerry mentions storage. My iPhone holds more than 8 times the standard BB amount, and no, it does not have removable cards to lose. 8 Gigs is a huge amount of storage for a portable device. Finally, the iPhone is not meant to be a replacement for the BB. It is for the rest of us who would like connectivity where ever we are. If you cannot live without push e-mail, keep your BB. If you want the ultimate in personal anywhere connectivity, by all means get an iPhone.

It's worse than that. The standard BlackBerry comes with 64 MB of flash memory--that has to handle the OS, etc. Thus, you have 108 times the storage of a standard BlackBerry.

Some BlackBerries can use MicroSD cards, which are now available in up to 4 GB, though I cannot determine if the BlackBerries can handle the HD SD cards. If not, they're limited to 2 GB. A good 4 GB Micro SD card costs about $90-100, so you should add $180-200 to the cost of a BlackBerry when comparing it to an iPhone.

I would agree with your last two sentences. There are lots of phones available. (One poster a few days ago implied that there was nothing between the "poor man's phone"--a prepaid phone and the "rich man's phone"--the iPhone.) Choose whichever one best meets your needs and stop griping about phones you wouldn't buy.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Jul 31, 2007 3:30 pm

Guest wrote:
At least for me the volume works just as I would have expected. Up on the switch is louder, to the right on the screen is louder. I too am looking forward to updates.

To right on the screen, to the left on the rocker, not up. There is no up when you're watching a video, it's left/right, and the way on the screen is opposite of the rocker.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Jul 31, 2007 3:33 pm

gslusher wrote:
Re: EDGE network: I'd guess that those complaining about how slow EDGE is must live in large cities. Check ATT's page for 3G availability. Here in Oregon, it's only in part of the Portland area. The rest of the state is without ATT 3G and probably will be for quite a while. There is no 3G access in Virginia (where I grew up) outside of the Washington, DC.

In fact, the places where I've lived most of my 60 years (including undergrad and grad school at MIT and 22 years in the US Air Force) do not yet have ATT 3G:

Roanoke, VA (18.5 yrs): NO

Cambridge, MA (6 yrs): YES

Dayton, OH (4 yrs): NO

Glendale, AZ (1.5 yrs): YES

Los Angeles, CA (4.5 yrs): YES

Annapolis, MD (6.5 yrs): NO

Santa Maria, CA (6 yrs): NO

Eugene, OR (13 yrs) NO

YES = 12 yrs

NO = 48 yrs

I doubt that I'm all that unusual. A 3G phone would, apparently, cost more and have shorter battery life. (Yes, I know that an ATT 3G phone would work on EDGE.) Why would I or much of the rest of the people in the US want to pay more and have shorter batery life so that we could use a network that we can't access?

Yes, AT&T is a terrible network to be on all around. 3G coverage is much greater on other carriers. Actually, we can leave out 3g and just say coverage is better on other carriers.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Jul 31, 2007 3:39 pm

Guest wrote:
You could just use the share button, on the screen to send the url from safari.

Well, that is nifty, and you're the first of 6 people I've spoken with that knew about that. This is still limited. You cannot chose which email address it will be sent from. You are stuck with whichever email address is the default. Simply adding the basic feature of a clipboard would alleviate this and a couple thousand other scenarios where the iPhone is deficient.

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2088 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Jul 31, 2007 3:49 pm

Anonymous wrote:

Yes, AT&T is a terrible network to be on all around. 3G coverage is much greater on other carriers. Actually, we can leave out 3g and just say coverage is better on other carriers.

Good point.

Like Verizon, perhaps? Their broadband coverage is better, but they also don't cover most of Virginia, for example. They allegedly cover Eugene, though some friends who use Verizon broadband would beg to differ. Verizon's broadband coverage leaves out all of the California Central Coast, from a bit north of LA all the way to Monterey, and much of the rest of the US outside of major metropolitan areas.

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yakirz said:

member since 22 Nov 2002 with 457 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Jul 31, 2007 4:33 pm

I spend most of my time in Augusta, Georgia, and in western South Carolina. AT&T has great general coverage in the southeast, but the closest city with 3G is Columbia, SC, and I'm only there every few weeks for a short time.

I have no idea when Augusta will get 3G, or the Hilton Head Island area, where I'm considering moving.

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A guest said: (hide)

Mon Aug 06, 2007 10:54 am

Maybe it is just me but I am happy with my iPhone and, I knew what some some consider to be limitations, before I ordered.

Dwight Silverman is looking for features which were not spec'd to begin with. Why in the hell did he buy the iPhone without reading about its capablities. Apple didn't hide the specs and features.

Get a life, Mr Silverman and don't spoil it for those users who are happy.

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