The iPhone: A poor job by Mr. Jobs…

There was some discussion last month about Microsoft Office coming to the iPhone. To be honest, I wouldn’t put money on that happening any time soon. There are significant hurdles to creating document editing application, as editing functionality on the iPhone is non-existent. No cut. No paste. No drag-n-drop. Nothing. Nada. It would all have to be invented from scratch. Thanks for that, Steve Jobs.

Realizing how hard it would be to edit documents on the iPhone got me thinking (once-again) of the disappointingly limited functionality of the device Mr. Jobs saddled us with.

I think Mr. Jobs lost touch with tech-reality, instead becoming obsessed with cool at the expense of useful. As folks who read my other blogs know, I bought an iPhone on day 1. I wish I could say it has been a completely positive experience but I still constantly notice things that were stupidly left out. He got the overall interface and appearance concepts right (look and feel), but that’s about all he did right. The feature set for this supposedly “smart” phone is embarrassingly stupid. He focused so completely on having “real” Safari, everything else suffered.

I frankly think he also failed with Safari. How can you brag that it is a full-blown Internet browser if it doesn’t support extremely common features of half of the web sites that already exist? Every time I go to one of the millions of web sites that use Flash, I feel like I was ripped off. I can’t even demo two web sites I developed on this supposedly “real browser” because of the lack of Flash support. Yes, I understand Flash is an add-on and not a “true” standard, but it is definitely in widespread use. So c’mon Stevie, admit you were wrong not to include it and work with Adobe to add it already!

In addition, I hate having to explain to a person with a $25 phone that I can’t exchange MMS photos or videos with them because Steve Jobs decided I didn’t need MMS on my $500 iPhone. My “revolutionary” communications device can’t do a “standard” thing that every $25 phone offered for free with a contract can do. *sigh* This phone has a fast processor, a camera, video/photo display capability and a microphone. Why leave MMS out? Jobs told us to send our photos in emails. Millions upon millions of inexpensive phones can do MMS and they CAN’T do email. How do we exchange photos with those millions of phones?

Speaking of emailing photos, viewing most email attachments is very hit and miss (mostly miss) on the iPhone. Receiving forwarded emails works only if the original email isn’t sent as an attachment (which some mail systems always do).  Further, once we find somebody else who can email a photo or video to us, we can’t even save it. In fact, there is no way to save attachments of any kind. Plus, we can only display video if it is downloaded through the almighty iTunes. Forget videos emailed to you.

On the subject of video, why can’t we capture video? The hardware necessary for grabbing video is built-in so what is the problem? In fact, why can’t we capture audio? Again, the hardware is all there. Thanks for yet another irrational decision Steve.

There are a lot of other shortcomings that make no sense. The wonderful landscape keyboard doesn’t work in the majority of places you might want to enter a lot of text, including composing email. So as a result, you are stuck pecking at tiny keys in portrait view and hoping the auto-correct picks the right word to insert. If you stick to a third-grade vocabulary, it mostly works, otherwise it becomes auto-incorrect, replacing correct words with words that make no sense at all.

Perhaps Mr. Jobs can pull on one of his collection of circa 1962 black turtle-necks and explain to us why there is no stereo bluetooth on a phone that is a stereo music player. (!?) Need more proof of lack of vision? Edge. Sure, 3G is coming, but it has been a LONG year surfing with the dial-up speed of EDGE.

I also have minor quibbles with some of the current iPhone applications. YouTube application ignores user subscriptions and YouTube had to generate special videos to accommodate Jobs’ short-sighted lack of Flash support. He decided not to put GPS on the device but then included an amazing map application. When he realized the shortcoming, he added third-party cell tower triangulation as a stop-gap measure. Sounds and/or volume levels for most alert types are fixed at one level and the user is unable to use any of the music on the phone as an alert.

In fact, ring tones are really poorly implemented considering music is normally already on the device. The phone has no printing ability at all over wireless networks. It has video out capability (with the optional cable), but no presentation software. It has a camera, but no way to move the photo you snap directly into one of your albums. Snapped photos always go into “Camera Roll.” You have to first upload the photo to a PC/Mac. Then you copy it to the album where you want it. And finally, you download the album back onto the phone. How stupid is that?

This phone uses the “incredibly stable” OSX operating system, yet still crashes randomly in a variety of applications after many months of patching. Even Vista has never once crashed on me and it is supposedly flakey in comparison to OSX. How can this be?

But the winner for the absolute most retarded thing about the iPhone goes to… (drum roll)

The battery.

It is not user-replacable. Holy crap, Mr. Jobs!!! Trying to find an evil way to make an extra buck is one thing, but literally moving technology drastically backwards makes you look just plain stupid. Period. I haven’t seen a cell phone without a user-swappable battery in decades. This is, by far, the most horrible drawback of the iPhone. When I use it a lot, the battery is stone dead in 2-4 hours, leaving me either screwed for the rest of the day, or searching frantically for some place to plug the damn thing in. I have seen laptops with longer battery life and even THOSE had swappable batteries. I emphatically DO NOT recommend the iPhone to anyone who depends on their cell phone to get them through the entire work day.

The more intelligent folks at Apple have likely wasted untold hours simply trying to convince Jobs of the value of the few things they have actually fixed and the few that are still coming these past 9 months. I really feel sorry for them having to fight such an uphill battle in order to fulfill the potential of what really could have been an amazing device from the start. It’s a shame.

Think about it. How many times has Jobs had to back-pedal on emphatic public statements when somebody behind the scenes finally convinced him how technologically short-sighted he was. Remember his declaration that video would never come to the iPod? Or his assertion that we don’t need native applications on the iPhone? He assured us it could all be done using web applications. Has anyone ever tried to edit a document using Google’s word processor or even play web-based puzzle games while on a 5 hour flight? Oops. Air plane mode means no web access. All of those wondrous web-based applications suddenly go “bye-bye” at the flip of a switch. (Or when Edge goes down for the millionth time and you aren’t near a hot spot…) Guess he didn’t think that through. It probably works fine in his own heavily-wired office and home, and that’s all he cares about. The real world works quite differently.

The one shining light for this device is the user interface. The user interface is what keeps us hoping that the iPhone will someday match the original promise of a revolutionary communication device. If it weren’t for the user interface, I would probably hate this phone intensely by now. Instead, I enjoy the few features that work and pray fervently for somebody to fix all the ones that are either broken or completely missing.

Now that the beta developer kits have been released, I have some hope for the future. Unfortunately, Jobs even controls which independent applications we will be allowed to install, so our choices will be limited to what he feels we need. Remember, this is the guy who decided we don’t need MMS or the ability to save email attachments. *sigh* Let’s hope somebody with common sense is allowed to approve most of the applications without his input. His feature-selection track record is not very good.

Here is the bottom line: Creating a device that not only looks pretty, but does ALL the things people actually need to do, without taking huge technological steps backward… THAT would truly be “revolutionary.”  What we have now is just a pretty, overhyped, battery-crippled, novelty. I’m praying all of that changes after June.