My handy iPhone needs more handy features

I like my iPhone and my wife likes her iPhone and we both have the 1st generation iPhone and don’t really miss the 3G features like the GPS much since we both have Navigation systems in our vehicles.  However, there are plenty of troubles that I’ve come across that just seem to be lost on the developers there in Apple Town.  Also, as a developer, I don’t want to blame everything on them as some lack of features could be a hardware architecture issue, manager’s choice, and/or “let’s hold onto that feature until version X” decisions.

1. Having to reboot

Why am I having to reboot my PHONE!? And every other day no less.  Was this built on the Windows 95 Operating System?  Are we working with Microsoft now, not Apple?  How many fan boys have I read that loved to point out that my Windows 95 machine had to be rebooted so often and here I am now having to reboot my phone.  Yes, I have a bunch of email accounts.  Yes, I have several applications that I’ve downloaded that are free.  But, this rebooting thing has been there since the beginning.

Signs you need to reboot your iPhone

• Your Blue-tooth starts sounding like your battery is dying (static, etc.) but you just unhooked it fully charged this morning.
• Your email isn’t checking at the intervals you’ve specified.
• Your applications fail to load or load and crash even though they worked an hour ago.  (bless you Cuberunner for destroying my waiting room boredom!)
• Your multi-touch actions start to delay beyond a few milliseconds.  Ugh, trying to turn that thing off when you’ve “swiped” to turn off and have to actually wait up to 10 seconds before the screen reacts is atrocious.

2. Playing songs ‘silently’!

If I can’t play the song and H-E-A-R it, then why play it?  Why give me three minutes of dead silence?  Why s it sync’d to my iPhone in the first place?  Yes, I know I can just skip to the next song when it happens, but good grief, I only have 8GB of space and 800MB of “silent” songs eats into that space pretty hard.  Also, having to fish out my iPhone just to skip past a “silent” song doesn’t seem like the next generation of computing to me (Yes Tech 5 influenced that line).  Here’s a few choices I could come up with for your next update:

• Tell me the song can’t be played because of that dastardly DRM.
• Skip the song completely and let me figure out that the song isn’t ever being played because of that dastardly DRM.
• Don’t let me put DRM songs onto my iPhone, or any i<whatever> through iTunes, that won’t play on that device.  Now there’s an idea.

I’m sure there are a few other options.  That’s why I have a comments section below.

3.  Not checking email!

There are configuration settings for checking email for every account.  My primary email is supposed to be on “push” and I’ve set my check mail settings to “every 15 minutes”.  Too often I pick up my iPhone where the ‘last time email was checked’ value is over 5 hours ago!  I have a lot of email accounts and support a lot of customers through this thing as my primary source of emails to at least know that a problem has occured and I shouldn’t have to handle my iPhone and click on the swirl icon to force the iPhone to catch up on my emails.

4.  Not using Blue-tooth!

I’ve had too many phone calls where I hung up one call and then tapped my next incoming call button with my thumb only to not hear them.  You know why? Because I used my thumb to answer the phone call instead of having to drop my phone so I could tap the answer button on my Blue-tooth.  So my iPhone decided I didn’t want to use my Blue-tooth on my ear.  Why is that?  Why can’t, by default, the phone use the Blue-tooth and let me choose to disable it.  My wife’s van tries to take the phone call over no matter what, so why can’t any of the three Blue-tooth devices I’ve used on it seem to do the same for my iPhone?

5.  Blue-tooth button does what exactly?

I’ve tried to understand the single button on my phone when I’m not dropping my iPhone to answer using that thing.  It’s obvious when the phone rings that it answers the phone.  But what exactly is it supposed to do when I hold it down?

• Does it call back the person I just talked with?
• How about the last person I called?
• Maybe the last person I called while connected to my Blue-tooth?
• Could it be the last person that called me?
• Perhaps it calls the next person I should be talking to because it integrated the Genius Feature and it has gone a little overboard with itself?

I certainly don’t know even after reading the directions because I’ve clicked that button and it started calling someone I hadn’t talked to in 3 days on that phone.  I personally liked it with my last phone where it would simply call back the last person I talked with on that phone indiscriminate of whether I called them or they called me first.  That way, if the call dropped I didn’t have to dig up my phone and find their number, just as I don’t have to dig up my phone to answer it.

Let me know what you think.  Comments are welcome.