iPhone – how they forgot the importance of SMS

Posted by: on Oct 14, 2008 | No Comments

I love the iPhone. However there are some shocking failings that persist even after several software revisions. They have particularly managed to completely miss out very basic features of SMS (texting) that every phone under the sun has. I don’t care about MMS and picture message crap – its the basics that matter.

Notable omissions include:

  • You cannot forward an SMS you have received to another person
  • You cannot send a number/vCARD from your address book to somebody else via SMS. Even my 9 year old Nokia 6100 did that.
  • You cannot send an SMS to a group in your Contacts book, without adding each person from the group manually. They added group SMS in an early firmware revision, but didn’t add a way to select just the group and have all members added. Sending a message to 20 people in a group is very boring.
  • When choosing the “Text Message” option in address book it does not automatically select their mobile number
  • SMS is treated as a separate feature from Phone where dialing, contacts, voicemail are. This is a bizarre and false separation. Contacts appear in the main home screen and in Phone – SMS should be the same.
  • There is no “mark all read” option on the main SMS summary screen – so even for short messages you’ve already read in the preview/alert screen, you have to go and view each manually.

This functionality is so basic and fundamentally affects the usefulness of SMS on iPhone.

Come on Steve, give us SMS we can be proud of!

iPhone 2.1 still not fixed app updating

Posted by: on Sep 12, 2008 | No Comments

Having just installed the latest firmware I find that Apple still have not fixed the bugs related to updating apps.

Basically when I try to update apps on the phone itself it tries installing it as a new icon instead of replacing the old one, and then fails at the end leaving 2 icons.

If I try to update from iTunes as the phone tells me to, it fails with a hex error code. The only solution is to delete the apps on the phone and in iTunes and use the store to ‘purchase’ them again which now requires an extra step of running ‘Check for purchases’.

Poor show.

Thankfully the SMS and contacts performance improvements are working really well.

iTunes 8 – are Apple bringing us wireless iTunes speakers soon?

Posted by: on Sep 10, 2008 | No Comments

I fired up iTunes 8 which seems a nice incremental update… but you wonder if all Apple apps will be exactly the same single unified app one day, what with all the feature overlaps. Genius seems to be working, not sure I’ll use it much.

I noticed that where previously I had some double entries of albums in my library, one on a shared NAS and one on my local HD (local one being a re-download from iTunes – yes they can let you do that if you have a problem!), iTunes has made them both point to the same shared NAS version. An annoyance I’m sure some will complain about – “lost” music is possible depending on how iTunes decided it was a duplicate, although I imagine they did this because it is an itunes purchase and those tracks have unique ids.

ANYWAY… I had a nose around to see what else is different. I noticed this in the iTunes preferences:

I don’t recall seeing “Allow iTunes control from remote speakers” before. Perhaps I’m wrong. Anyway this, coupled with the Remote app for iPod Touch / iPhone and the lack of AirTunes/Airport Express refresh for years surely points to some future wireless speaker + wifi repeated product, that you will be able to use to control itunes either directly with buttons on the speakers, a local remote, or over wifi to the speakers (even if out of range of your iTunes machine) via iPod or iPhone.

I just hope they make humidity resilient versions for the bathroom!