Danny Gorog17 August 2007, 10:13 AM
Our list of 15 things Apple urgently needs to fix in the iPhone, plus a comparison with Windows Mobile: does Microsoft have the edge?
1. EDGE is too slow for the iPhone.
There are still lots of phones that ship with only 2G GPRS or 2.5G EDGE data support, but it's really not a big deal on those phones because their Internet capabilities are so watered down as to be almost useless.
On most phones, the web browser mangles pages into something that's mostly text-only and WAP-like. Even on Nokia phones with the Safari rendering core, the user interface for panning and scanning the full size web page is still too cumbersome to be useful for regular web browsing on the go.
With the iPhone it's different. Safari is really usable, and when it's purring on WiFi, it's an absolute pleasure to use. But stick it on an EDGE mobile network and the frustration builds quickly. On many web pages the load times are intolerable for regular browsing.
On Windows Mobile, the browsing is experience is slow to render and the user interface is so generally awful you probably wouldn't notice the difference between WiFi and 2G/2.5G anyway.
2. Mobile Safari is great, but not for all websites.
Try going to theage.com.au or smh.com.au on your iPhone and you'll soon see why Mobile Safari isn't 100% compatible with all sites on the net.
Digg is another example of a website that doesn't render quickly on Mobile Safari, which is curious considering its lightweight layout.
On Windows Mobile, the browsing is experience is still so awful there's no comparison. It might be called "Internet Explorer" on Windows Mobile, but it's a pale comparison in terms of ability to render pages compared with IE for Windows.
3. Inputting information into web fields can be slow and painful.
For some reason inputting text into fields on a website can be awfully slow. Sometimes iPhone just freezes up and won't accept inputs at all. I've noticed different performance on different sites so your mileage may vary.
Like #1 and #2, on Windows Mobile, the browsing is experience is still so abjectly dreadful you wouldn't notice if there were problems with text entry fields.
4. Deleting multiple emails is way too hard.
If you've got more than a page full of emails (and you will when you first set up Gmail on your phone) it can be a nightmare to delete them all. Plus, once you start deleting them, more come in. It took me two days of solid deleting to finally clear my inbox.
This is a user interface flaw that should have been picked up by Apple if it wants to be taken seriously in the email-phone space. Blackberries have had simple menu commands like "delete previous emails" for years.
You can't easily delete emails on some versions of Windows Mobile either, though. (The version that runs on the BlackJack, for example).
5. The virtual keyboard is good, but not great.
I still miss my Blackberry keyboard. I've spent over ten days on the iPhone now and while I can type quickly I still find it less comfortable to hold with two hands. Also, there's no way to edit the custom dictionary but there needs to be.
You could be on any different Windows smart phone. Some have great keyboards (like the BlackJack) and some have only on-screen keyboards.
The ones with only on-screen keyboards suck eggs and shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence as the iPhone's virtual keyboard -- they often require stylus input, and have none of the iPhone's smarts like a popup character that appears above your fingertip so you can be sure you're pressing the right on-screen key.
6. The camera doesn't work if your subject is moving.
It's too slow. It is however as good as the best camera phone if your subject is still and the light is good. Also, while the interface is simple it's very quick to view the photos you've t