Multitouch/Download improvements

[gotzero]

I finally went against my better judgement and bought a first-gen mac product. Coming for a long line of Blackerrys, I am still having some growing pains with the iPhone.

The first thing that is most frustrating is e-mail. I really could care less about being able to hold music and movies. I want my e-mail to work perfectly. It drives me insane that e-mail is not automatically and completely downloaded to available memory when the phone senses it. This would not be any kind of overload for the network, because as far as I am concerned, if you are getting e-mail sent to a phone, it is because you want to see it. E-mail should be downloaded to the phone when sensed, and it should stay there. As far as I can tell, there is no way to make certain that e-mail will be stored on the device for access without a signal, which is really frustrating (this will save bandwidth for frequently viewed messages...). Please give us a way to devote memory to storing e-mail/caching pages. Also, for messages with attachments, I believe the phone attempts to download the entire attachment (which it sometimes cannot view/play) before it will show you the message. I had an e-mail come this weekend with a large attachment that I could not view until I got home. In my opinion, this is not acceptible.

Secondly, please give us more fingerworks functionality. On the fingerworks keyboards, you could do just about anything, and it would be wonderful to add some of these input gestures to the iphone. Maybe copy and paste could be a start... It would be so great to get a new fingerworks era command every update. The iphone to me right now seems like the tip of the iceberg, and it could be made so much more powerful and friendly with additional commands that already exist.

Overall, I am happy with the phone, and the web browsing experience has made me willing to tolerate everything else. It would just be so nice to at least know that some of these things were being looked at, if not on the way.

 

[scaredpoet]

I finally went against my better judgement and bought a first-gen mac product.

I feel your pain. I didn't buy an iPod until the 5th gen. And while I had used Macs at school and at work since System 6.0.8, I didn't get one of my very own until April of this year.

Yet, just two days ago, against my own better judgement, I got an iPhone. Also a former Blackberry user.

The first thing that is most frustrating is e-mail. I really could care less about being able to hold music and movies. I want my e-mail to work perfectly. It drives me insane that e-mail is not automatically and completely downloaded to available memory when the phone senses it. This would not be any kind of overload for the network, because as far as I am concerned, if you are getting e-mail sent to a phone, it is because you want to see it.

First off, understand that the phone actually *is* downloading e-mails the moment it "senses" them.

Unlike a Blackberry, the iPhone does not have the benefit of having a vast server farm in Waterloo, ON tasked with the sole purpose of pushing signals to it the very moment an e-mail lands in your inbox. A Blackberry's hallmark is this push e-mail capability, and for that, a large array of behind-the-scenes proxies and push servers has been built. To access those servers, Blackberry users pay a premium - typically twice the amount you pay for an Apple data plan - of which most of the proceeds go to the makers of the Blackberry product.

So why doesn't Apple make its own push e-mail product? Because if it did, the iPhone would, amazingly, be more expensive to own than it already is. Push e-mail is a very risky thing to be offering these days, because a lot of companies claim to hold the patent on its concept and are very lawsuit-happy. RIM (the makers of Blackberry) as well as NTP, Visto, Seven, and even Microsoft, all claim to hold valid patents for push e-mail, and have all sued one another at one point, threatening to shut down each other's networks, unless payoffs were made.

The VERY unfortunate result is that unless you pay what amounts to extortionist blood-money "licensing fees" to one or more of these companies, you will get sued out of business. Palm is learning this painful lesson now, and although it's not in the news anymore, RIM still risks having its Blackberry network shut down, again, if it loses yet another ongoing patent case on this.

Apple, wisely, probably chose to stay out of this whole mess altogether because of this, and instead has configured the iPhone for "pull" e-mail (in which your server is manually checked by the phone at set intervals). This compromise works decently well for a lot of people, but obviously not for everyone, especially those who have grown accustomed to one of the above products and now needs and expects their e-mail immediately.

Now, if you really want push e-mail, Visto is claiming it will start offering the service for Exchange and Lotus-notes e-mail in the 3rd quarter of 2007, and is offering a 60-day free trial. You can sign-up to be notified of its launch here:

http://www.vistomobile.com/vistomobile/page.cfm?pageid=166

The bad news: after 60 days, you will probably have to pay a service fee to Visto to keep the service. Again, push e-mail is NOT cheap.

Secondly, please give us more fingerworks functionality. On the fingerworks keyboards, you could do just about anything, and it would be wonderful to add some of these input gestures to the iphone. Maybe copy and paste could be a start...

I do agree with you there. Copy and paste would be kind of nice whn you think about it. I have't played with the iPhone anough yet to really miss it though, but then I haven't really don'e much in terms of forums posts with it yet.

Overall, I am happy with the phone, and the web browsing experience has made me willing to tolerate everything else. It would just be so nice to at least know that some of these things were being looked at, if not on the way.

Again, i agree with you on the web browsing. Just three days ago, I was trashing the iPhone for its lack of 3G and other capabilities. Yet after spending real time with it in the Apple store, it grew on me, and I was eventually addicted. This is the first "smartphone" that I've used that I really feel comfortable using as a mobile internet access device, and its elegant rednering of the web more than makes up for its shortcomings.

 

[gotzero]

I understand that true "push" e-mail is blackberry turf, and I was willing to make that sacrifice when I switched over. The thing that gets me is that you can pull up a message you have already looked at on the phone before, and it will pull it off of the server again.

I just wish there was a setting, like that available on many non-blackberry smartphones, to choose to D/L messages, and if so, what amount of space in memory should be devoted to them.

I was doing pretty well until I got a message with a large attachment, and I could not even get the text of the message to show up (I assume because the phone was busy grabbing the entire attachment, which it probably could not have seen anyway...).

I guess I just miss the little things, like an icon on the menu bar to let you know you have e-mail when you are just looking at the unlock screen or using another application. I have no problem pulling e-mail, I would just like it to stay on the phone until I delete it.

The more I use the browser, the more I fall in love with it. I am even considering getting rid of my aircard because I have hardly used it since I switched from the blackberry to the iphone.

Overall, it is an amazing piece of kit, I guess I am just ready for update number 1. Probably the first thing I have had which I can say is really a convergence device for me, and I do not even use it as an ipod...

 

[opticalserenity]

Coming from a Blackberry 8700 with BES push email connectivity, I have to say the iPhone is probably NEVER going to be that perfect in push email.

Not only do you get PUSH email from Blackberry enterprise Server, but you get full two say wireless syncing of your calendar, tasks, notes, contacts as well. All very nice things I really really miss.

 

[yoman]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3)

I agree with your assessment. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future software update.

 

[d21mike]

Yahoo Push Email

Yahoo Push Email can be used. I realize it is not as good as BlackBerry or Exchange but it is Push email. I also think that it will get better. I for one hope they License ActiveSync to fully support Exchange Push Email, Calendar and Contacts.