iPhone: Not all rainbows and puppy dogs

iPhone: Not all rainbows and puppy dogs

Now that so many people are coming down from their iPhone highs, I thought I'd continue to rub into their faces how good my experience has been. But then I redecided and thought about the weak points in my iPhone enjoyment instead.

1. Safari bites off more than it can chew. In general, the "real" Internet experience on the iPhone has been great, but sometime it's too much for it to handle, resulting in a crash. The crashes are fairly predictable, usually occurring when I zoom and slide long or JavaScript-heavy pages before they finish loading. I dodge a chunk of this by viewing the RSS feeds of the sites I visit daily, but for all others, the solution is patience.

2. Assisted GPS (http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/gps.html) not getting much assistance. When I'm outside, I can get a GPS lock no problem. Obviously not going to work as well when I'm indoors and out of satellite line of sight, but cell tower triangulation is supposed to help offset that. My attempts so far have either failed or shown minimal accuracy. Fortunately, I usually know my location when indoors.

3. Music apps aren't integrated into the iPod. I stream music over Pandora (http://www.pandora.com/) almost all day. It is a fantastic service, very well implemented on the iPhone. However, it can't play in the background while I'm checking email or be controlled by the iPod remote on our home speaker system. I would love for Apple to open up the iPod component to developers so that Pandora and other music apps could be integrated into the iPod system.

4. Why can't all web videos work like YouTube? If you find a YouTube video in a web page, you can tap it to make it play in the iPhone's YouTube app. Cool, but how about sharing the love with other web video formats?

And that's pretty much it. There are also the occasional reboot (http://sumocat.blogspot.com/2008/08/you-know-how-i-know-iphone-is-computer.html) and the disappearing app trick (http://sumocat.blogspot.com/2008/08/disappearing-iphone-app-trick.html) I already reported, but those are nothing I can't handle. No fatal connectivity issues. I've yet to run the battery dry (came close once). The iPhone did a full crash once, not sure what could have caused that. So, not quite sunshine and candy canes, but pretty darn good so far.
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