Unlike a few other bloggers, I’m still infatuated with my iPhone. This is one cool device and I’m using it more as time goes on. A few more thoughts:
1) Devices the iPhone replaces me for me – Nokia N95, Blackberry 8800, Nokia N800, and 8G iPod Nano. Not a bad score on the convergence front.
2) There are claims that push email works from Yahoo, so I set up a Yahoo account to test. However, it doesn’t appear that my iPhone (with its built in Yahoo mail configuration tool) is even able to get to my Yahoo account. It tries to authenticate to an apple.mac.yahoo.com server which keeps bouncing my credentials. Will have to look into that more and see if push mail is a reality.
3) In the meantime, I do have mail fully working exactly as I want it on the device and with about 10 minutes of work with Eric, we got the IMAP folders working no problem. I now have access to five years of email from the iPhone if I want it. I like the way folders are implemented in the client because it works for me to only have the folder checked for new mail if I click on it. I only care about six folders any given day, but it is nice to know I can drill down if I want. I have my mail set to check for new mail every 15 minutes.
4) Battery life – I used the phone yesterday pretty heavily on wifi until midnight including watching a lot of uTube stuff late last night. I left it checking email all night half expecting that would have killed my remaining battery, but when I woke up this morning, I still had about 25% charge left. It looks like the battery will be sufficient for my use. I’ll likely carry a battery backup (that I had for my old iPod) in my gear back just in case.
5) uTube on the iPhone is lots of fun and well implemented. I found a lot of stuff to watch last night. With this phone in tow, you will never truly be bored.
6) I am still having those same 11 files resync every time I connect. Very annoying, but manageable.
7) I’ve crashed the phone a few times mostly browsing sites that push the browsers limitations.
8) Typing. I’m “using the force” and typing as fast as I can on a Pearl, but not quite up to regular Blackberry keyboard speeds yet.
9) Double clicking on websites is very cool! I just discovered it last night. It auto zooms to display just the content you are clicking on. Apple must do some analysis of the page and determine what is associated with where you are clicking. It works great and is supported in the mail application too! This makes viewing full size websites like CNN very cool.
There are a few features that Apple really needs to add to this phone.
1) Landscape mail, SMS and document viewing. Each of these apps really needs a landscape mode on the iPhone.
2) A way to disable inline html images in mail from external sites. This is a security issue for me as it validates that my email works for a spammer. I need a way to disable them and only load them on a case by case basis.
3) I need a quick “go to url” style button in Safari. I don’t like scrolling to the bottom of a page only to have to scroll all the way up to open a new site. I get around it by launching a new tab, but that is not efficient.
4) I really want iChat support. More than any other feature, I’d love to see iChat support on this device. Right now I am using SMS for a few folks and it works great, but iChat it is not.
5) Visual voicemail is not working for me. In fact, I get no voicemail notification at all, yet when I called my own number and accessed voicemail that way, there was some waiting for me! I am hoping this is just a matter of servers being overwhelmed.
6) I have a hunch that visual voicemail works by having the voicemail downloaded to your phone into a voicemail application. If that is the case, it needs to support wifi and not just Edge. The missing piece for me could be I haven’t been on a strong edge network for any length of time. Regardless this needs sorting out in a hurry and I will call tech support on it if it isn’t working by Monday morning.
7) Still impressed with call quality, though I would like more call volume. It could be I just haven’t found the sweet spot of where to hold the phone against my ear, but in a crowded room I was having a tough time hearing the other party yesterday. Granted, there was a lot of background noise.
8) SMS messages need to queue. Right now, if you key one up and are outside of network coverage, it does not send if you go into a coverage area unless you go back into the SMS app and hit “send” again. I’d like these to queue and send automatically when I get back in coverage area.
9) I want bluetooth keyboard support.