iPhone niggles
So, I’ve had the shiny for a day now, had a good play with it and can honestly say it’s great… But it could be better.
Text entry on the little keyboard takes a bit of getting used to, although I can’t help thinking just providing numbers on larger buttons and using T9 predictive text would be easier still. The predictive dictionary it comes with doesn’t seem to be as good as T9 but it’s not too bad. Text manipulation sucks. There appears to be no way of selecting, copying and pasting text which, to me is a major oversight.
Given it must have a dictionary for the predictive text there is no built in spell checker (something that most Apple applications have as standard these days). Given the state of my spelling I do tend to rely on things like that.
The camera sucks. Badly. It doesn’t cope at all well with bright sky and tends to under expose pictures if there are any strong light sources. I’ve never liked cameras on phones, but this one just seems particularly poor.
The ressesed headphone jack is a disaster. 10/10 for not using some crap proprietory connector, -1,000,000 for making it so only 5% of the worlds headphones will fit without an adaptor. Given that problem I’ve not yet investigated the whole ‘answering the phone while listening to music’ issue.
The speakers get awfully muffled when covered which means hearing the phone when it’s in your pocket can be an issue. If you have baggy pockets (such as the ones on the trousers I am wearing) you don’t feel the vibrate either. Hopefully this will be less of an issue with headphones in since it should play alert sounds through them.
There appears to be no todo list (or I’ve just not found it yet) which is a shame since all the other PIM applications are there and seem to work well enough.
I’m also still getting to grips with the whole multitap interface thing, although that is more lack of familiarity than anything else.
I think that’s most of my major gripes. It’s still very shiny and (since I have more money than sense) I don’t think it’s too expensive. The best feature out of everything is how they display SMS conversations. Top marks there and if everything else on the phone was that good and that revolutionary I’d have paid £1000 for one, no problem.
To give you a rough idea of how fast typing on here is (or isn’t, depending on what you’re comparing it to) this blog entry was done in about 40 minutes on the train from Cromer to Norwich 
text input worked much better for me when i stopped trying to correct it.
just pressing space at the end of a word completes with the suggestion instead of the weird gesture to accept it.
i’ve already noticed it realise i’m typing with right hand one key to the right, but still figure it out. that’s good.
i’m still typing quicker one handed than two, but that might change. beats trying to type on a blackberry or one of those tiny keyed sony ericsson jobs (like my w850i)
A Wii-style T9 pad could have been useful, but more of a gimmic, i think… hell, they might as well have done a palm-style grafiti thing too *shudder*
i have just completed my first real-world, mission-critical test. i used iphone to order curry after consuming >1 bottle of wine.
success!
and i was really impressed with how i was able to find/store the phone number of curry house using google maps app.