iPhone

Up here in Alaska there are only three cellphone providers available.  Two are regional (ACS and GCI), and AT&T Wireless.  My wife and I had T-Mobile.  T-Mobile had been our carrier since I switched from Cingular several years ago.  The problem was that T-Mobile is in a roaming state no matter where I was at.  It didn’t affect our billing or our calls out very much, but on the incoming side we were having all kinds of issues.  Voicemails and texts would sometimes come hours after they were left, the phone wouldn’t ring, and other issues with the constant roaming.  It got to the point where we decided just to switch carriers, and we decided to go back to AT&T because we could carry our phones anywhere an not have to worry about roaming, phone number, etc.

We also decided to splurge, go high tech, and get iPhones.  We got iPhone 3Gs (even though EDGE is the only data AT&T has up here) on a pretty good deal, and AT&Ts iPhone plans include unlimited data at a rate not much worse than our old T-Mobile non-data plans. Kinda makes sense since iPhones are useless without data.  Anyway, out we walked with two new iPhone 3G 8GB models, new local numbers and my wife happy with a “gadget.”

We have been playing with them for a few days now, and my wife is still happy with hers.  I am pretty happy with mine too, but the iPhone has revealed a few flaws which need to be resolved, and after scanning the web, I am not the only one wishing these issues were resolved.  First of all, I love a lot of the applications available, and most are free or really inexpensive.  Location based service just seems to work on the iPhone.  For instance, I installed the free Google Mobile app.  If I open it up and speak my search term “Pizza,” for instance, it will find all the pizza joints within a given range of my iPhone, give me the google results, and show me on a map where they are at.  Very useful in a new town!  There are a lot of social networking apps that use the location stuff too, but that is not so useful to me, although its neat to see.  Syncing and installing things is a breeze, and I was afraid the 8GB would be a bit space constrained, but iPhone apps are actually pretty small.  The biggest downside with apps is that most require access to the web to get data.  In the U.S, thats not a big deal, although a bit slow on EDGE, but when I deploy I wonder how useful a few of my apps, like Epocrates RX, are gonna be.  Will they work without network access?  The PDA/data side of the phone “just works.” Its elegant, well designed, and easy to figure out.

The three biggest “needs” for the iPhone have nothing to do with applications though.  They have to do with standard iPod or phone services.  The first is that the iPhone has no “disk mode.”  If you plug an iPod into your computer, it will show up as an external disk and allow you to copy files to it.  It doesn’t give you access to the music, for copyright legalities, but it lets you use the empty space as data storage.  The iPhone doesn’t have this turned on, and I have to say “why not!”  I carry some records around with me on a thumbdrive and since the Army decided we couldn’t use them anymore, I figured I’d keep some on the iPhone where at least they would be viewable.  Could I move them?  No, not without getting an app that basically sets up a webDAV server on the iphone so you can copy files over wirelessly.  Once again, not that big a deal when I have wireless access. However, since I am about to be without wireless for a year, I can’t send or receive files from the iPhone.  There is no real reason I can think of why disk mode is not turned on.  The piracy thing has not been an issue since early iPods thanks to the way the filesystem works.  A firmware upgrade might wipe out the data, but:
1) People using iPods for for data storage are used to the way firmware upgrades work, and
2) You should keep backups of that data anyway.

Apple, if you don’t want to enable disk mode, how about a way to Sync “My Documents” or some folder through iTunes and give access to just that folder when the iPhone is plugged in.  Many PDAs and phones have a similar method of data storage, so it shouldn’t be hard to do.  In fact, Air Sharing sets up a Public Folder and a “private area” to copy files into without giving access to the whole phone filesystem.

The second big negative hit for the iPhone is the Bluetooth Support.  From what I read and discovered the Bluetooth schip in the iPhone supports all the Bluetooth profiles you could want, but Apple decided just to enable the two headset profiles.  The profiles for A2DP, OBEX, etc are missing.  So you can’t use wireless stereo headphones on the iPhone.  No big deal for me, but the one that gets me is the OBEX file transfer.  Every BT capable phone on the market, even the cheap free ones, offers OBEX FTP.  Thats how you send a contact from one phone to another.  You know, open the phone choose a contact, and hit send via BT.  The receiver then gets the contact and its in his addressbook.  I used OBEX all the time under T-Mobile for sending contacts and pics to my desktop or my wife’s phone.  The only way to send a contact with the iPhone is via e-mail, and thats only because of third party apps.  This is bad form.  Apple just decided not to turn on OBEX, even though its present. 

Lastly, there is no MMS on the iPhone.  No sending pictures, except via e-mail, no receiving pictures, etc.  A friend sent me an MMS the other day, and it was proxied by AT&T, I received an SMS telling me to click a link and enter a code.  That is so 1990’s.  Almost all basic phones accept MMS, in fact most carriers offer MMS rate plans.  Honestly, I don’t know if this is a failure of Apple or AT&T, but it needs to be fixed.

I get the idea that Apple and AT&T were so paranoid about RIAA, piracy, and legal issues they crippled any mulitmedia access capability on the iPhone in one way or another. Everything I mentioned above can be fixed with software upgrades.  Most of these issues were solved in other phones (and even in the iPod itself) years ago.  Even if they don’t want to open BT, diskmode, and MMS carte blanche, they could make them much more useful by allowing them inside apps (ie a Send via BT button in Contact) within context.  If Apple fixes these issues that throw the phone part of the iPhone back into the 90s, it would really be an awesome platform, much more so that it is now. Not that Steve Jobs and Apple are going to listen to me, or anybody for that matter.