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Criticizing Criticisms, Part 4 of 5

by Marc Zeedar macopinion@designwrite.com

There's no spam filter on the email.
There's no filtering of any kind on the iPhone, let alone spam filtering. I wish it did as I love automatic sorting of my emails into folders, but it's not that big a deal. I get hundreds of emails a day to my various accounts but I don't want to deal with all those on my iPhone anyway, so it makes more sense to me to set up a separate email account and forward just the most critical to the iPhone. By doing that I can use my desktop's spam filtering and reduce the number of emails I end up with on my iPhone.

Besides, most people don't get that many emails. This is the kind of thing that only effects power users, and those are exactly the kind of people who know how to set up additional email accounts and other workarounds. Not a deal-breaker.

There's no search within the contacts list.
I've heard of business users who have thousands of contacts on their phones. Finding a particular person can be awkward since the iPhone only lets you jump to names starting with a particular letter. This is not a big deal with only a few hundred people as that might mean you only have 10 or 20 names in each alphabetical letter to look through. But if you have thousands of contacts, that could mean hundreds of names that begin with "S," for instance. That's a lot to scroll through to find the right person.

Still, this is not a problem that will effect most people, who have a reasonable number of contacts. I'm confident Apple will add a simple searching system in an update, but in the meantime, it's not going to bother the majority of iPhone users. Also, iPhone does support contact groups -- so you could set up smaller subsets of contacts (i.e. family and friends, categories of business contacts, etc.) which would help reduce the number of contacts you have to browse through to find someone.

There's no video recording.
This falls under the "nice to have but not essential" category in my mind. But then, I've never even had a cameraphone, let alone a vidphone, so what do I know. But I seriously doubt the lack of video recording would stop someone from buying an iPhone.

It's also possible that this is a feature Apple could add with a software update. After all, video's merely a sequence of still photos. But the quality may not be very good if the iPhone's camera is not really designed for video recording (though rumor has it that the iPhone's camera is very similar to the iSight camera in most Macs), but either way I wouldn't exactly be planning to use the iPhone for your next home movie.

Office documents are read-only!
Before the iPhone launched the world was horrified to think that the iPhone couldn't even read Word files. Then, when it was revealed that it could, people started complaining that it couldn't edit them! Where does it stop?

Do you really want to be editing complicated desktop files on your handheld device? Okay, sure, in a pinch it might be nice to make a correction or addition, so I can see the long-term value, but I can also see why Apple left that functionality out of iPhone 1.0. Perhaps it'll come from Apple or from a third-party down the road, but for right now I don't think enough people see Office editing as a critical feature. Certainly regular people aren't too concerned. Smartphone users might see this as a deal-breaker, but then the iPhone isn't targeting traditional smartphones -- it's focusing on the broader consumer market.

I can't use my iPhone as a modem!
First all the complainers moan about the slow speeds of Edge, then they complain because they can't use the iPhone's Edge connection with their laptop! One reporter wrote that he didn't like having to pay extra for Internet at hotels and liked being able to use his cell phone as a modem.

I must not stay at expensive enough hotels. When I travel, I make it a policy to only stay at places with free WiFi (often a Motel 6 or the local equivalent). If they don't have it, I don't stay, it's as simple as that. I was shocked to learn that some pricey hotels actually charge extra for Internet service. I wouldn't stand for that. That's ridiculous.

I can see how an iPhone-as-modem would be useful in a pinch, but I imagine this is low-priority for Apple. I'm not surprised it didn't make the 1.0 release. AT&T might not be too happy about it either as they might think it's abusing their network. I wouldn't hold your breath for this, but it might be added in the future.

In the meantime, there are hacks to allow this. Right now they are rather complicated, but like all hacks, there will eventually be a simple way to enable this even if Apple doesn't officially support it.

But iPhone doesn't run Program X, which my current Smartphone does and I have to be able to run that program!
Come on, it's unfair to compare the brand new iPhone, out for a month, against long-standing smartphones that have been around for years with tons of software. Those phones all started out with no software, too. Obviously the iPhone will get better and better. Give it a chance. Don't bash it just because it's not as mature as existing phones.

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