iPhone Update 2.1
Battery life has improved immensely. Immensely. However, every once in a while I notice that my iPhone goes into a mode where it gets and stays warm, and the battery starts to drain at a much faster rate. A power-cycle usually gets it out of this mode.
What hasn’t been improved, and needs some real attention is “notification”. First, the vibrator motor needs to be beefed up. Rarely do I feel the vibration, if I am on the move. In noisy rooms, my Sidekick’s ringer may have been drowned out, but the vibrator was hard to miss.
Now, I did say “notification”. I want to be able to look at the phone, and at a glance, see how many IMs, emails, Facebook messages, VMs, missed calls, SMS, … The iPhone needs a centralized way of displaying notifications – especially if you have been away from the phone or away from a cell tower.
Safari needs to cache pages better. Like most people, as I read a site, I click on links and travel to other websites. Being able to hit the back button and immediately return to the previous pages without waiting for reloading is simply expected.
While I am at it let me suggest a mode where one can read a page and tap on links to be opened either in the background as separate windows, or in a queue to be traversed once the current page is dismissed. The key here isn’t to just crate a queue, but to load the pages in the background as you are reading the current page.
Double tapping the title bar of windows in many apps scrolls you to the top. Can we allow a second doubledlock, if already at the top, to move you to the bottom of the page? Or a triple click can move you there. But first, let’s get consistent and have all apps handle the double tapping as a “Home key” command, and then an “End key” action would be great.
Safari crashes with no provocation. In one 2 hour period, reading blogs, Safari crashed over half-a-dozen times. Some of the crashes occurred without any manipulation of the iPhone. One second I was reading text, and the next, I was looking at a blank screen while waiting for safari to finish crashing.
Since the 2.1 update there does seem to be an annoying lag or delay between clicking in text fields and the appearance of the keypad. Also noticeable is a lag between when buttons to navigate between pages are pressed such as the buttons that move you through the mailbox heirarchy of Mail.
Which brings me to Mail: there need to be competing offerings for email client apps, or Apple needs to work harder to get more features incorporated. Email is too important an app to keep dumbed down. As someone with a number of mail accounts and hundreds (more than a thousand) of emails on my iPhone, I need a way to search, to automatically file and to sort emails. Today I needed to access a hotel confirmation number for a reservation made accouple of months ago and the fastest way to do it was to scroll through a few hundred emails – in different mailboxes!
Lastly, I need to be able to assign shortcut typing codes in order to increase productivity in iPhone. Like I had on my Sodrkick. I want u for you, ur for your, ure for you’re, ull you’ll, illl I’ll, msg message, and many others.
-mz
CriticalMusings 