October 25, 2009, 9:55 PM — I love my iPhone. App store magic has transformed the device from a mediocre phone with a vaguely interesting user interface into what I think is the single most important consumer electronics product ever. Unfortunately, three admittedly minor but deliberate limitations nearly wreck the iPhone party.
[ See also: What kind of digital nomad are you? ]
When most technology companies actually invest time and effort to hobble their own product with an artificial limitation, users freak. Not so with Apple. Fanboy extremists bend and twist "logic" to argue about how the limitation is a good thing. Everyone else just accepts or ignores the limitation. Here are three examples.
1. No wireless hardware keyboard
A wide range of keyboards built for cell phones that connect via Bluetooth have existed for more than a decade. If Apple built one, or allowed others to build one, we could use our iPhones for real work -- writing blog posts, for example, or doing serious e-mail. All Apple would need to do in order to transform iPhone into a netbook would be to get out of the way and let some company build such a keyboard. Because Apple deliberately hobbles its product this way, we have to go out and buy a separate netbook.
2. No podcast "shuffle" or continuous play
The previous version of iTunes and/or iPhone OS enabled you to select all your podcasts, and drag them into a playlist. The benefit of this was that you could just play he playlist on the iPhone, and one podcast would play after the other automatically. Apple disabled this feature by blocking you from dragging podcasts into a playlist. As a result, you now have to manually go in after each podcast is complete, back out of the podcast, select the next one and select play.
This is a safety hazard in the car. Instead of just setting podcasts to play, and driving while listening to podcasts as if they're talk radio, drivers will now be tempted to take their eyes off the wheel to move to the next podcast. The disabling of this feature might literally kill people.
Podcasters should be talking about this in every podcast until Apple re-enables fumble-free serial podcast playing.
3. Intrusive Wi-Fi connectivity
When you've got Wi-Fi turned on, the iPhone tries to connect. If the strongest network is password protected, the phone just keeps trying to connect instead of quickly giving up and kicking over to 3G.
This is especially vexing if you listen to podcasts (see item above). Every time you're forced to go in and jump through hoops to play the next podcast, the Wi-Fi networks pop up for you to deal with. This even happens in the car when you're driving through town.
The Wi-Fi issue has gotten so bad that I don't ever even turn it on anymore. It's just not worth the hassle.
These are the three things I hate about iPhone. I hate them because all three represent deliberate, active prevention by Apple. They are artificially created problems that Apple engineers created on purpose.
Apple: tear down these limitations!
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