Everything is Rubbish

So, I bought myself an iPhone. I said I wasn’t going to, but I did it anyway. Unfortunately, from my point of view as a user there are a lot of things wrong with it. Here are just a few of them…

• When signing up, my phone number to be ported had to be input as a purely numeric input - no spaces, dashes etc. As the very first thing that happened as I went to register my phone was to be told I’d done something wrong when I’d simply copied and pasted my phone number from Apple’s own Address Book application, this did not make me happy.
• The headphone socket is recessed by several millimetres, making the use of standard earphones impossible. So, I had to buy an adaptor to allow me to be able to use my nice inner-ear earphones. Obviously this meant that I lost the microphone and play/pause functionality built into the normal Apple earphones. Frankly though, I think that’s a small price to pay to be able to listen to my music properly and not cause everyone around me to have to listen to it. I’m very much looking forward to the first third party inner earphones with the microphone and play/pause controls built in.
• Originally I’d written that my fingers didn’t always hit the right keys on the onscreen keyboard. However, that was before I realised that if I just went with it, then the iPhone’s inbuilt software would pretty much correct anything that I’d written incorrectly.
• My big annoyance with the iPhone, however, is that not everything rotates. Safari does, but Mail.app doesn’t. The music portion of the iPod application rotates, but the video portion doesn’t. However, when you start to play a video then you’re automatically switched into landscape mode, necessitating a rotation of the screen. Then, when you finish watching a video, you’re dumped back into portrait mode. This causes me annoyance, in a device which costs so much money that it really shouldn’t.
• Most of my annoyances actually come from the iPod application, which really does seem like a retrograde step from my previous 30Gb Video iPod. For example, if you have a song with a long title, on the iPhone this title does not scroll to allow you to see it in its entirety. This gets rather annoying as I quite like to be able to see what I’m listening to.
• Another annoyance comes from coverflow. Sometimes when I rotate the screen into coverflow mode, the album artwork of the song I’m listening to changes! Anyone have any ideas why this would happen?

Overall the iPhone is a good device, but there are a good few things wrong with it. Thankfully though, they’re pretty much all software problems, which _can_ be fixed in a later software version.