The iPhone Guru - All things iPhone, made clear

Sometimes it’s all about the little things. If an iPhone is greater than the some of its parts, then it’s weaker than the some of its faults. I have found many minor quibbles over the past year. Some you no doubt will agree with, while others you may even consider to be a feature. Here’s my list for better or worse:

• No indicator lights – Every phone I’ve owned prior to the iPhone used flashing colored lights to tell me at a glance what was going on. Knowing I have a text or missed call or email was easier then. I still miss this feature daily.
• No snooze – I constantly forget appointments. I want to be reminded constantly so I don’t agree to go to lunch when I already have plans. The one and only reminder the iPhone gives me is almost negligent!
• No Wifi/Bluetooth toggle – I’m not having as big a problem with this as I used to since I gave up on Exchange Push to conserve power. Now I leave Wifi on all the time. But this is less than ideal. I want a simple gesture based method to toggle both Wifi and Bluetooth.
• Casing durability – Although I’m a case junkie now, I haven’t always been that way. My Tilt went naked and stayed in pristine condition until its eviction. Why can’t my iPhone have a similarly scratch resistant coating?
• Speakerphone volume – I know most mobile phones have speakerphones that suffer from an electronic form of Ventricular Phonation, but the iPhone seems to be down towards the bottom of the pack on this one. The volume issue also spills over into its playback volume for media.
• AT&T – I’ve been with AT&T for a LONG time now. Before that I had Sprint (on America’s first all digital network). In the intervening years I’ve grown skeptical of all carriers. But exclusivity equals comfy laurels
• Jack of all trades, master of none – Actual phone call quality is below average for me. Maybe the previous item is the source, maybe not.
• No background apps – All the way back to my first TSR, Sidekick, I’ve known that background apps would be right next to sliced bread for me. Although I’ve gotten along without them begrudgingly, my patience is quickly running out.
• No Voice Command on the 3G – And my Tilt did it years ago better than the 3GS does it now.
• Shake to Undo – Sucks.
• Flash support – As in: “Might as well support Flash so that we don’t have to support Silverlight”.
• Limited Import/Export of Data – Very limited abilities to sync contacts, etc. to or from Exchange.
• Useless lock screen – Why doesn’t the lock screen show my upcoming appointments? It does if I Jailbreak and install a FREE 3rd party app you say?
• Missing Copy All – So I’ve got my contacts on my iPhone and then we get Exchange at work. No way on the iPhone to copy all my contacts up to my Exchange account. Only option I have is to basically have two full sets of contacts or I could let it delete all the contacts already on my phone. Awesome!
• App Store Potentate – Lets hope the FCC can curtail this beast. We really are missing out; its all about the software folks.

On a positive note, if I was writing this before the release of the 3.0 firmware, the list would have been 3 times as long. At least you didn’t have to scroll past THAT post.