Tuesday, July 31, 2007

PhoneMort Update

Well now i'M iRate. There are a few shortcomings with the iPhone that are inexcusable. There are some business practices at play here that are as well.

Shortcomings:
There is no copy and paste. iThought that this was supposed to be a smartphone replacement. Some even said it would be a laptop replacement. On occasion iDevelop software and run services from my laptop. iKnew it would not replace that but jeez...

Only one address per SMS and no "Reply-All" option. This is only made worse by the lack of copy and paste.

No vcards for sending or receiving. iUsed to transfer my contact information from my old palm phone via iR. Once phones started going to bluetooth, iWas limited in my ability to transfer contacts. Now iCannot transfer contact information at all. It all has to be typed.

iHave to email people my, and others', contact information which cannot be copied and pasted into the email. If a contact has more than one email address, it goes to the first address; there is no choosing.

There are numerous software bugs that can be expected in a first release that do not bother as much except for one...

With multiple mail clients on my laptop, iDo not always have the primary one active. If iSync the phone with the non-main account running, all of my contacts are deleted and replaced with the active mail account's contacts. Moreover, the warning message states that it will modify more than five contacts on the computer. All changes made since the last sync are lost. PhoneMort* was almost used for target practice after that happened.

There are a number of business practices that fell into play here too. Again, it was the "unadvertised ones" that bother me:

The developer API was extremely limited in scope. iThought Microsoft was bad about this.

LNP was not fully tested. This is what allows mobile customers to retain their phone numbers when switching operators. This was a rush to market with regard to least used scenarios.
Fortunately, most of these things can be fixed with software improvements. Failing that, a hardware upgrade in .44 caliber may be needed.

*PhoneMort is the name for my phone. Even if iTunes did not require that devices be named, it would still be PhoneMort. Why PhoneMort? Because my wife's iPod is "PodMort" so "PhoneMort" just seemed to follow.

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