iPhone 3GS
By Nick Manteris · 0 Comments · Leave a Comment
The iPhone 3GS is the first iPhone that I’ve been able to use for an extended period of time, but I’ve clocked in a decent amount of time playing around on a first generation iPod Touch. Not having a camera, a microphone or a speaker really limited the iTouch and these new features are welcome additions that really add a lot of functionality.
The central problem that both of these devices seem to share is a difficulty organizing the applications. Even if you temporarily offload the four “always there” apps and use that space to move the others around it’s still frustrating and eats up quite a lot of time. I refuse to believe that the people responsible for this touch screen OS are incapable of creating an interface to facilitate the organization of applications. I’m even surprised that a third party group hasn’t come up with a solution by now…especially considering that it’s been over two years since the original iPhone came out.
After app organization, the most glaring problems are related to text messaging:
- When a text message comes in there is no way to acknowledge that you have seen and read it without unlocking the phone. This seems like minor functionality to add when you consider the fact that music can be paused, played, rewound and fast-forwarded without the need to unlock the phone…and the volume can be adjusted as well. It should definitely be accident proof, like “slide to mark as read,” but it doesn’t seem like an impossible feature to include.
- Whenever you go into “messages” it automatically goes to the most recent message instead of the list of all the messages. (Some people might want to view the most recent message though, so this should probably be a setting that can be changed in preferences.)
- When a message fails to send it puts an exclamation mark icon next to the actual message inside the specific chat, but there is no icon if you’ve moved to the all-messages screen. And there’s definitely no badge on the “messages” icon from the home screen. If you aren’t going to have some sort of automatic retry on messages that have failed to send (another preferences setting?) then the OS should have some sort of alert to let you know that your message didn’t go out. It’s only right.
- Probably the most annoying (and important!) issue of all is the sounds when you get a text message: the choices are extremely limited and they pretty much all suck …with a mighty, mighty suckness. The inability to add new sounds is inexcusable. Ringtones can be purchased and you can even make your own, but the text message sounds are locked. You can’t even choose a ringtone for texts…not cool, Apple.
- Another major flaw with the sound system is that the volume for text messages and phone calls is linked. Let me explain with an example: I get a lot of text messages, but not very many calls, so when someone calls me it’s probably important and I definitely want to hear it. I usually don’t, though, because I want the text messages to be as quiet and unobtrusive as possible. Because if the text message noise were the same volume that I need the ringtone to be then I would smash the phone to pieces in order to make the noises stop…you know?
So, other than the text message points and the organization of applications, the only other problem that I’ve encountered is a difficulty taking pictures because of the touchscreen button. (Of course, I must admit, this is more of a problem when taking self-portraits, but still…) How difficult could it possibly be to have an override setting for one of the physical buttons? I’d rather be able to use the top button or the volume buttons to take a picture…even when I’m not pointing the camera towards myself.
These are the only issues I’ve experienced – so far – after using the phone for less than a week, but I will end with one new feature that I would include on my phone if I were going to design one: Most phones already have a silent switch, but I would like to have a three-way (“L” formation, if possible) toggle switch with the options “silent,” “soft” and “loud.” Because there are different environments that people find themselves in and three options are always better than two.
