I’ve been pretty vocal about the fact that the iPhone is practically as good as it can get but I constantly hear people complaining about the iPhone and its very few downsides. What’s most frustrating about this is that most of these complaints, in my opinion at least may make the iPhone worse, not better.
There is a website called “Please Fix the iPhone” where iPhone users can create new wishes for the iPhone and vote on what they would like to have on the iPhone most.
Right now the top 5 requests are:
- Copy and paste
- Landscape Email View
- Flash Support
- iChat
- MMS
I’m not going to rant too much about this since I’ve talked about them in the past but I thought I would revisit them since they keep coming up.
Copy and Paste: I don’t want copy and paste. I don’t have any reason for it and other than the few times when I’ve had to put in a password for Wifi I’ve never had a reason to need copy and paste. Not to mention the user interface issues with copy and paste. I’ve heard many explanations about how “simple” it would be to implement but I just haven’t heard a single solution that would be easily explainable to the average person.
Landscape Email View: I can understand why you would want landscape view while reading email because then you won’t have to zoom in so much and use your finger to scroll left and right going across each line of text but I don’t understand why anyone would want this while typing. Maybe I’ve just trained myself to prefer the portrait mode keyboard but I actually HATE the landscape keyboard. The problem is that you have to stretch your thumbs so far to reach the center of the keyboard so inevitably you end up typing much slower.
Flash Support: Not going to happen. And honestly I don’t want it to. If having flash support means that I’d lose 0.5-1 hour of battery life while browsing I just don’t want it. I don’t have many problems with the iPhone’s battery life but adding flash support would kill the battery life of a device like this.
iChat: iChat would be nice, especially if it could run in the background but, do you really need it? I don’t I pay for unlimited text messaging on my phone and I use that so much more than IM (I probably haven’t opened an IM client in about 6 months, and even then it was for track on Twitter, not for chatting). IM is a thing of the past and text messaging has taken over.
MMS: I don’t want it. If you want me to see the dumb picture of you and your buddy drinking at a bar you can upload it to Flickr and send me a link in an email, there is never a reason that MMS can’t wait, it doesn’t need to be instant and that is exactly why the iPhone doesn’t need MMS. Thanks to the App Store though you can easily upload your photos to various different hosts and then send me a link to them via email by visiting them using Safari.
I’m sure many of you will think I’m an Apple fanboy because of this post but do remember how upset I was when Apple dropped the price of the iPhone just a few months after it was initially released. If Apple does something wrong I’ll call them on it but so far there have been very few missteps and the cases where they have messed up have either been very minor or fixed immediately.