The iPhone: 10 Things Apple Did Right, 10 Things That Need Work

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The iPhone: 10 Things Apple Did Right, 10 Things That Need Work

PC World Editors Sat Jun 30, 6:00 AM ET



10 Things Apple Did Right in the iPhone


The display, the display, the display. Everything looks good on it. The menu design: It's simple and clean, and the home screen icons look like so much eye candy. Fingertip navigation, zooming and scrolling that's intuitive, effective and fast. Video playback that's so good you can tell when you've done a sub-par job of ripping your movies. Visual voicemail lets you get to the calls you care about faster. Great integrated applications, including Google Maps, YouTube, and a world clock that packs a timer, stopwatch and multiple alarms. Cover Flow. It's incredibly fun to choose your music by visually flipping through album art. It's tough: Our initial stress tests suggest that the iPhone is more durable than you might expect for such a sleek handset. The first Apple music player with a built-in speaker--and it's not half bad for a phone. No disconcerting "do not disconnect" messages when syncing with a PC. 10 Things They Did Wrong

We want our AOL Instant Messaging--and Yahoo and MSN IM clients, too. What about MMS support for sending picture mail? No voice recording--and more importantly, no voice dialing support. How are you supposed to use an iPhone with a hands-free car kit? It's the most locked-down phone we've ever seen. Not only can you not swap out the AT&T SIM card for one from another network, you can't even swap it out for another AT&T SIM card. AT&T is building out its mobile broadband network, but iPhone users are stuck with older EDGE technology--or battery-consuming Wi-Fi. You know those great headphones you already own? They won't fit the iPhones headset jack, so your first iPhone accessory will be a bulky, ugly $10 adapter. The software keyboard invites typos--but when you're entering passwords there's no way of telling whether you've got them right. It's great that the iPhone can reorient pages in Safari, CoverFlow, and the photo album, but why not extend that capability to other apps such as e-mail? Some messages could benefit from a widescreen display. And even when it does reorient, it doesn't always follow through with all features: CoverFlow loses access to the volume slider, for example. No support for custom ringtones, surprising in a music phone. The camera's rudimentary, with no audio/video or even zoom capability. No to-do list support, a basic in most calendar applications