mkaz.com

I’ve had my iPhone for a few weeks now and here are the real issues I have come across.

1. No MMS Text Messages. I do not know of any cell phone which can not receive photo messages, except the $600 most advanced phone on the market. This one just baffles me. I do not care about Apple budgets, timelines, time-to-market or any other business blah-blah. They sold me a $600 phone, I want it to handle the basics.

To top it off, if you receive a photo you are sent a text message which includes a link, a username and password to retrieve the photo from the web. However, this is completely unusable because the link doesn’t include an http:// which would make it clickable in the iPhone. Plus there is no copy and paste so the random username and password (unique for every message) is practically impossible to type while switching between SMS and Safari.

2. Recessed Headphone Jack. Another baffling design decision, the headphone jack is unusable by almost all 3rd party headphones. All those fancy Bose and Schure headphones won’t work without an additional adapter. The mini-headphone jack has existed since the 80’s, it seems like you would have to go out of your way to make your device not work with them. The least you could do is include an adapter.

3. Incompatible Power Adapter with MacBook. I wrote about this one before.

4. Sync. This isn’t an Apple issue per se, or even a direct iPhone issue but I really really really really really just want to be able to sync my GMail Contacts and my calendar (Google or 30 Boxes). I’ve switched back to 30 Boxes because they tie in nicely with Facebook, but that’s another story.

My current processes, which is not ideal but sorta works: Calendar items I can create on the web, which iCal then syncs to which then gets synced to my iPhone. However, I can not create an item on the iPhone and have it go back up to the web. At least this work flow is automatic.

Contacts are the opposite and more painful. I use the Mac OS X Address Book to manage all my contacts. So whenever I get around to “syncing”, I do an export from Address Book which can then be imported to GMail. This process manages to either get duplicates in GMail or I clear out Google before hand and I lose addresses that I only had there.

5. Custom Ringtones. How come I can’t use any of my MP3s for ring tones, or have custom ring tones for different people. Another basic cell phone feature you would expect.

However, one look at the beautiful screen and I forgive it for all its short comings.