Things I Would Change about the iPhone

Thanks very much to Brian Papa and Hilly for their guest posts this week during the Summer of Love. Tomorrow you can look forward to John from Buddha On the Road. Sunday I’ll be reviewing the new Schick Quattro Titanium Trimmer because I was contacted by someone to review it and they sent me one for free. I’ll totally whore myself out for free product, believe it.

I’ll also be announcing the new timeslot for SecondHand Radio. I hope to have a show next week, gotta line up some guests. If you’re interested in being a guest on the show, please let me know. Otherwise, I just may be contacting you this weekend.

I love my new iPhone, I do. I’ve had it for several days now and it rocks. But it could rock harder. These are the things that, were it in my power, I would “fix” on the iPhone.

1. Replaceable Battery. So the battery on the iPhone is still not replaceable by users. When the battery runs through its life cycle, you have to take it in to an authorized Apple service center to get a new one. This is bullshit, especially since they just released the brand new iPhone 3G. Apple could have made this happen, but chose not to. Every other cell phone on the planet allows users to swap out their battery.

2. Battery Life. The battery life on the iPhone sucks balls. You can almost literally watch the meter run down as you use the damn thing. I don’t know what the deal is here. I mean, the iPhone is pretty thin…thinner than a deck of playing cards. I’d actually prefer to have a thicker phone if it meant improved battery life. I’ve read articles saying that if I disable the 3G network, turn off the Wifi, stop the push email, etc., then it’ll extend battery life, but what the fuck? These are the reasons I *bought* the thing to begin with! I see a battery pack backup in my near future.

3. Sideways Texting. The iPhone virtual keyboard takes some getting used to, for sure. I’d imagine it is a real pain in the ass for anyone with thick fingers. I’m forever making mistakes and, yeah, the autocorrect works rather well. But it’d be much better if, when I turned my phone sideways in text mode, the screen would flip sideways to make for a wider keyboard experience. The iPhone does this when you’re looking at a web page, the flipping thing, why not make the same thing happen in text mode? And in email mode, too?

4. Calendar Syncing. It’d be nice if the iPhone would automatically sync my Google Calendar. It does it with my Google contacts, so why not the calendar, too? The only built-in support for calendar syncing is for Outlook, which I don’t use. And I don’t use iCal, either…not even sure if that works with Windows. Sure, I can use the built-in calendar, but it doesn’t sync with anything on my computer. What would be FANTASTIC is if I could sync the iPhone calendar with my Thunderbird Lightning calendar. I don’t know what the MobileMe thing is supposed to do, but I don’t think I should have to pay another fucking dime, let alone an annual fee, for something that the iPhone should already do.

5. Video. There’s a pretty sweet camera on the iPhone, but what would make it better is if you could shoot video. Impromptu video situations come up all the time and then I could upload the video to Flickr and that’d rock. I mean, hell, there’s an 8GB hard drive on this sucker. USE it.

6. Camera. What I LOVED about my old LG CU500 phone was the swiveling camera lens. It rotates from front to back so you can easily take self-portraits or swivel the lens around to the back and take photos of friends that way. Self portraits with the iPhone are difficult. Yeah, there’s a mirrored Apple logo on the back of the phone (where the lens is) so you can see yourself while taking a picture. BUT. The camera button is on the touch screen on the other side. A dedicated camera button on the top or side of the iPhone would be sweet.

7. Recording My Own Alert Tones. Cannot be done. Yet. Without using Jailbreak, which hacks your iPhone and it’s not THAT important to me. I’m hoping that this functionality will come in future iPhone software updates. I’d like to be able to choose something other than the six SMS alert tones that come with the iPhone.

8. Background Applications. You can’t run more than one app on the iPhone at a time. That’s something that Hilary really misses about her old smartphone. It really would be nice to have multitasking on the iPhone and then switch from app to app without losing your place. Writing a Wordpress blog post and being able to switch back and forth between texting and blogging…that’d be heaven.

9. Contacts Syncing. Yes, it’s cool that iTunes (which is how you sync up your iPhone) allows you to sync Google Contacts with your iPhone contacts. The problem is that it creates a buttload of duplicate contacts. It’d be nice if it gave you a merge option when it runs across duplicate contact names. Merge people’s emails with their cell numbers, etc. My contacts are now kind of a mess. We’ll see how it goes with Outlook now that I have that. I’m hoping my contacts will import into Outlook.

That’s all I can think of at the moment. I realize this is rather boring for anyone who doesn’t have an iPhone and/or isn’t thinking about getting one. But hey, this is what’s on my mind at the moment.