It’s been about a month since I’ve made the switch from Blackberry land to succumbing to Steve Jobs’ eye of Sauron by jumping onto the iOS platform with the iPhone4. It’s a great phone for everything except if your office is built on Microsoft backends (mainly Exchange server) or if you’re trying to actually use the iPhone for actual work. I’ve tried to come up with a list that hopefully Apple decides to update in future releases of iOS.
- Can’t forward meeting invites from within the Calendar
- Maybe I should stop having meetings, but until then, I’ve got to forward the original e-mail that contains the .ics file to new recipients.
- Unread mail count only counts Inbox
- 90% of my e-mail gets filtered on the server into folders and never makes it to my Inbox. In order to see what else I got, I’ve got to either keep it in my Inbox or manually check the folders within the Mail accounts view.
- Unique profiling for messages/calls
- If a normal spammer decides to send me an email, I’m fine with the phone not doing anything, but if it’s my boss or someone important, I’d like the option to notify me differently.
- No “das blinken lights”
- Ties into the above — that was one of the coolest things I liked about the Blackberry: the multi-colored LED that flashed. Maybe it’s a bit early 1990s <blink> font, but it’s damn useful. At a glance, I can tell if I’ve got new email, new calls, unread voicemails, and more all from just the blinking light and what color it is.
- Timestamped messages (SMS/IM)
- As cheesy as Blackberry messenger was, it worked really well. Three modes were displayed during a conversation (much like a present day IM client): delivered message but not read, delivered message that has been read, recipient is typing a response. More importantly, each conversation line was timestamped.
- Advanced server-side e-mail searching
- Since you are limited to 200 e-mails max on the phone, you won’t get any search results back that are older than that. Sadly, that is about the amount of e-mails I get in one day.
- No jump to next unread message
- I’ll often skip around when replying to emails, then go back in later and jump to the next unread message. Luckily the list isn’t too long since the iPhone restricts to 200 emails.
I’m probably missing some others, but these are the quick ones that irked me. Aside from the above, I think the phone is great.
