As the reality distortion field begins to fade, people are starting to wake up to the iPhone’s shortcomings. I’ve been assembling a list of issues I’ve seen mentioned:
- No SDK.
- No Flash.
- No Java.
- No Bluetooth file transfer.
- No DIY MP3 or AAC ringtones.
- Although the camera takes 2 megapixel photos, the only way to get them out is to e-mail them, which resizes them to 640×480.
- No Bluetooth keyboard support.
- Need a new battery? $80 and you have to mail the phone to Apple and wait 3 business days.
- Poor talk time.
- No instant messaging.
- No modem support for using it with your laptop.
- Recessed 3-pole headphone jack doesn’t work with regular headphone plugs.
- No video support from the camera.
- No MMS (multimedia SMS).
- Glass front invites disaster.
- No unread mark support in mail (IMAP).
- No filters in mail.
- No voice dial.
- Regular SIM cards don’t work, so you can’t get an overseas SIM and avoid roaming charges.
So yeah, definitely not buying one. But I bet iPhone 2.0 in a year or so will rock.
Damnit, my sarcasm detector’s needle is all over the place.
Apple don’t usually have a habit of making a product that sucks at first and then rocks in the next version, do they? That’s sounds more like… well, everybody else.
No Java, no bluetooth transfer, no modem just stick out like sore thumbs. Insane.
Well, I thought the lack of gapless playback was a horrible defect of the iPod, and they eventually fixed that, but you had to buy a new iPod to get the fix. I expect it’ll be the same for the iPhone–the problems will be fixed, but the people thinking they’ll all be fixed as free software updates are fooling themselves.
The iMac had a horrible screen. That was fixed in the LCD version. The original iMac and G4 puck mouse was unusably awful, they fixed that too. The early Yikes G4s had pretty bad hardware limitations, fixed with a motherboard revision to the Sawtooth model. And that’s limiting myself to Jobs-era Apple; if you go back to before the messiah’s return, there were tons of products that were awful in their first iteration and fixed after a couple of revisions.
The interesting thing is how many of these restrictions don’t apply to desktop OS X, suggesting that things like Java and Bluetooth file transfer were deliberately ripped out, rather than merely not implemented.