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Phone features are secondary
Overall Apple's done a fantastic job at blending a multi-functional device into one unit. It's certainly succeeded better than any other device (of any kind). However, it's not perfect. My one gripe is that at times Apple seems to have relegated the phone features to a second tier. While I understand their instincts to do this -- it is the non-phone features that are most exciting -- for most people the phone part is their main use, at least initially.

Let me give you some examples. To access phone features you go to Home, then press the phone icon. From there you can go to Favorites, Recents, Contacts, Keypad, or Voicemail. The phone app remembers what you were looking at previously and shows that same screen (in other words, if you were at Contacts when you leave the phone app and return, you're back at Contacts).

That's not terrible, but it is several steps. I'd like to see some kind of shortcut to jump you straight to a location of your preference. For instance, Contacts or Favorites. I suggest a double Home press: tap the button twice and you go right to Favorites, then tap to dial. Easy.

Others may prefer a different shortcut action: for instance, that same double-tap could take you to iPod mode. For heavy music players, that would be ideal.

Bookmarking is limited
I have some quibbles with how bookmarking is implemented in mobile Safari. For instance, there's no way to add a bookmark without going to that page. With a slow network connection, that can be time consuming and annoying. I often read blogs which mention interesting links -- I would like to bookmark those pages without going to them right now since I'm still reading the blog.

Along those same lines, you can't force a link to open in a new page like you can on a full computer.

Both of these limitations could be easily fixed. Right now when you tap and hold on a link you get a dark gray popup box that displays the link's full URL. But letting go of the button makes the popup disappear. Why not let it stay for a few seconds and add a bookmark button? Clicking on the popup itself could automatically open the link in a new window. Both problems solved.

Safari close page bug
When you're looking at web pages in the multi-page view (to switch between browser "windows"), there's a red "x" widget at the top left corner of each page which allows you to close it. It is, in fact, the only way to close pages.

Unfortunately, when you go to a page with an extremely long URL, the URL displayed wraps to a second line. Often this line goes on top of the red "x" widget and when you try to tap on the close widget the iPhone doesn't detect it. The only way I've found around this is to open the page and go to a page with a shorter URL -- then you can close that page.

It's a bug, Apple. Fix it.

Safari caching is poor
Mobile Safari is supposed to have some intelligent caching but I find it terribly ineffective. It could just be the particular way that I surf the Internet, but I don't like it. What happens is that I tend to visit news and blog sites that contain numerous links to other sites, which I'll visit and then click the "back" button to return. Every time I do this Safari must redownload the original page. Even on WiFi this isn't fast, and most of the time I'm going to be leaving the page in a few seconds anyway, by clicking on the next link, so it's annoying to have to wait while it downloads the whole page.

This particular style of surfing works great with full Safari on my Macs, but the cache system of Mobile Safari just doesn't work well. It should remember my previous page without needing to download it every time.

No music pause button
I love that the iPhone will play music while you do other things: browse the Internet, send emails, etc. But frustratingly there's no way to pause the music without several steps. You have to press Home and then the iPod button, and then tap pause. That's far too complicated. When someone starts a conversation with you or you receive a call on your land line, you need an instant way to stop the music.

None of the iPhone's hardware buttons make sense for this (you need the volume controls, the ringer silencer, and the sleep button just sleeps the screen, not the music). However, I notice there's a small "play" triangle icon in the upper right of the iPhone's screen next to the battery indicator. Why not make that support tapping? Tap to pause, tap again to play. No need to switch modes.

Emails not grouped by topic
I guess this isn't exactly fatal, but I'm spoiled at the way Apple Mail groups emails on the same topic together. The iPhone does not do this, resulting in emails in chronological order, which can make reading emails on the same topic more difficult as you have to search through unrelated emails to find them.

No way to add photos from emails or web pages
The iPhone's got an awesome photo browser and a decent camera, so I find it odd that there's no way to add emails to your library from the iPhone. You should be able to add photos that are inside an email or on a web page. I'm sure this'll be coming, but it's rather a severe limitation today. It's caught me several times.

For instance, my mom's got her iPhone and I wanted her to have some of the pictures on mine -- photos of contacts I took with my iPhone. My first thought was, "Oh, I'll just email them to her." But then I realized that wouldn't work. She'd have to get the emails on her computer and add them to iPhoto and then resync her phone -- a lot of steps for something that should be easy.

No document storage.
A similar problem is that iPhone has zero support for document storage. This is extremely odd, since the iPhone has good (read-only) support for Office documents. You can get docs onto the iPhone by emailing them to yourself, but there's no way to move those attachments elsewhere on the iPhone.

For a 1.0 device, I can understand why Apple left this feature out, but hopefully it will be added in the future. Just a simple Documents folder is all we need.

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com