Observations/shortcomings of the iPhone
Well, we’ve had nearly a month to work out the kinks of the iPhone 3GS. I’ve got some common sense observations of what we like and what we don’t like.
First thing we like is the ease of use. It’s a very easy to use phone, and the visual voicemail is a plus. It’s truly a terrific phone. The next thing we like is how email is presented on the phone. The “virtual push” works nicely, as nice as Blackberry. Just turn off the new email notification and voila, no email addiction. E-Mail is easy to read on the iPhone, and you can enlarge the text quickly. We also like how well Safari works with the Web. It’s easy to surf pages that are not intended for mobile devices, and the ones that are, well, they look and work as clean as if they were apps, written for the Apple App Store.
The iPhone is billed as a smartphone. It does have a huge application library, so about whatever you can think of, “yes Virginia, they do have an app for that.” To have that kind of “buy-in” by developers makes iPhone the best device on the market.
However, business people like myself note a few very obvious shortcomings. The first shortcoming is with MS Outlook syncronization. All sync is done through iTunes. So, iTunes has clearly become Apple’s beachhead on the battle of the PC war. So, you would think that iphone email would sync up with the iPhone, right? Wrong, they only sync your ACCOUNT SETTINGS. But other than that, the POP3 email world has to be see double. Yup. Yup. Every email twice. Every email twice. One can clearly see how that would be counter-productive. So, while we can switch to IMAP, and put the sync problems to the mail server, all Microsoft Outlook’s collaboration efforts such as tasks, appointments, and calendar functions don’t work well in IMAP.
Second, Outlook users find that their task lists don’t come over to the iPhone. Why? Because Apple’s made in California, where employees don’t shave or cut our hair very often and like to wear socks with sandles when it gets cold. Don’t believe me? Go see the Apple store’s employees at the St. Louis Galleria. It’s their “corporate flair”.
The last thing we don’t like is how it handles, or should we say doesn’t handle flash or windows media files. Many people use flash. There’s a tremendous amount of Flash games out there. Apple’s support of Flash would truly kill the Blackberry dead, as RIM truly deserves to die. If the media viewer would support files other than Apple’s precious quicktime, the iPhone would also end the terrible Windows Mobile Smartphone altogether. Taking both rivals down seems easy, so I wonder what’s Apple’s problem?
Come on Apple…the World uses Microsoft Office. They use Outlook ’cause it’s a complete collaboration tool and iPhone at a MINIMUM should do everything outlook can do. I firmly believe this, because, Apple proves time and time again, that they can. Just get a haircut and look at the big picture.
-c-
