After playing with the iPhone this weekend I can say that its pretty darn cool. I’m quite impressed with the touch sensor and the rotation features, specially for web browsing and watching videos on YouTube. After signing up on Saturday night, the iPhone was “activated” on Sunday morning. It is now Sunday afternoon and and the phone calls still go to the old T-Mobile phone. Here are a list of features that as far as I know are missing and would be nice to have (the iBads) and stuff that absolutely rock (the iGoods).
The iGoods
All the graphics and icons on this thing look absolutely amazing, and load super fast.
The Map is terrific, specially when you are using Wi-Fi. The step by step direction view can be a life saver.
The photos the iPhone takes are so darn crisp and sexy.
In iPod you can easily change the volume using drag.
in Safari, there’s an innovative URL history, and even a thumbnail history version that you can drag left and right to browse.
The web browsing capability is really good. Clicking on tiny links on a webpage seem to accurately pick the right one and typing URLs is breeze.
Using the Wi-Fi connection makes surfing even faster. You get an alert about available Wi-Fi networks wherever you go. This can become annoying after a while however.
Setting up a Gmail account was a piece of cake.
The suggestions as you type for spelling are nice. But after a while they started to get on my nerves. I hope I can disable this feature.
The iBads
Setting Ringers from Songs in my library. Why can’t we do this? or is it possible and I’m just missing out on how to do it? I was upset when I found out my Treo can’t do this but iPhone?
VoiceMail innovation - I was expecting some innovative features like that of GrandCentral such as personalizing greetings by caller, and listening to voicemails as they are being recorded.
Adobe Flash plugin for Safari. I can’t view any videos in Safari, only via the You Tube application. Hmmm… The Bluetooth doesn’t have an automatic sensor, and requires you to turn it on every time you need it. Leaving it on the drains the battery. It would be nice to have a sleep mode.
There is no week view in Calendar. Calendar doesn’t change view as you rotate the iPhone.
The Map is not rotation sensitive.
It appears that I can search for business listings by type, but not by name. A search for Pinkberry returns no results but a search for Yogurt returns 21 Choices, Pinkberry and a slew of other local yogurt shops.
The Calculator is nice but doesn’t support advanced calculations such as financial and statistical functions.
The sync cable doesn’t have a release button so it feels like you are yanking it out of the iPhone.
I have long fingers and keep hitting the wrong letters on the keyboard. I hope this is a short lived problem and one will eventually get used to keying accurately.
Setting up a pop email account is doable, but I can’t seem to figure out how to set advanced settings such as specifying an SMTP port number. SMS messages don’t render smileys :(
No MMS picture messaging
No GPS
Can’t buy music or video content from iTunes store
Dude, where are the Games?
No Instant Messaging built in (AIM,Yahoo,Google Talk,Jabber,ICQ)
No Video Recording
No Flash or Zoom in Camera
No Java
No 3G
No Highlight/Copy/Paste functionality
Can’t easily check the weather in other cities using the weather widget
No Ajax support in Safari
Can’t exchange contact information via vCards etc.
Uswappable battery
Bluetooth is not Stereo
Potential Voicemail Security Exploit
Can’t sync via bluetooth.
Can’t sync email.
Can’t install new Apps
Finally, no way to use the 8GB of space as storage for storing files.
Most of these can easily be fixed via software releases, and the others will require hardware changes. I guess that’s why lots of people are waiting for the second revision.