Well I received yet another text from a friend and I couldn’t forward it like I could on my n73 so I thought I would email Steve Jobs at Apple and see what he has got to say (if I get any reply at all)
Click Read more to see the email I sent him.
Steve,
The iPhone is a truly revolutionary product. I love the feel of it and am proud to show it to my friends. However, I thought I would send you this email to tell you about my experiences and what I believe to be the downside of it.
I bought a 3G iPhone shortly after they were released over here in the UK. Shortly after getting it I was browsing the web in safari, updating my profile in Facebook and playing Tap Tap Revenge on the train. All was going well until I started using the phone features in the iPhone.
Since Apple is new to mobile phones the general public do not know a lot about their phones and features. I feel that others like me make assumptions about what features will be on it. These assumptions are made from phones they have previously owned like Nokias and Sony Erricsons.
Let me start by listing the features and then letting you know how easy they would be for someone to implement. The features I believe the iPhone is missing are :-1) Forwarding of SMS Messages.
2) Sound Profiles
3) Picture MessagingForwarding of SMS Messages
This is the feature that I miss most on the iPhone. All of my friends get sent funny jokes etc by text. It is then very common to forward these onto your friends. How hard would this feature be to implement?
My idea would be that when you load the SMS program and see the speech bubbles with the texts in. You would tap your finger on the message and a popup would then appear asking if you would like to forward it. A new screen would then appear asking you to select the recipients.
Also allowing people to forward texts would also generate extra revenue for mobile providers.
Sound Profiles
I use my iPhone in conjunction with my work exchange server. Push email is fantastic. Being able to read emails as soon as they hit the server is a great advantage in mobile working.
With SPAM mail so prominent on the internet and companies emailing you newsletters every hour of the day , it is highly frustrating that you cant setup sound profiles like you can on Nokias etc.
There is nothing more annoying than getting woken up in the middle of the night by your iPhone mail alert, checking your emails and finding out its an email from Apple informing me about the new range of iPod Touch’s.
I could flick the silent switch on the side of the iPhone but then I don’t want to miss important phone calls that might come in when I’m on call.
With my nokia n73 I could setup various sound profiles. I would set it up like below :-
Daytime
Ringtone – Maximum Volume
SMS Alert – Maximum Volume
Mail Alert – Maximum VolumeNighttime
Ringtone – Maximum Volume
SMS Alert – Silent
Mail Alert – SilentTrain
Ringtone – Low Volume
SMS Alert – Low Volume
Mail Alert – Low VolumeWith the iPhone, I have to go into settings and change all the options manually. Surely it wouldn’t be hard to implement this. All the other phones do it.
With firmware 2.1 you have added the facility to turn off individual alerts, but still I have to do this manually. Ideally you would like premade profiles which would change all the settings for you.
Picture Messaging
After doing a bit of searching on google I found an article which said that the reason why this wasn’t implemented on the iPhone was due to the small demand in the USA. In the UK however there is a demand and it would be nice to have this feature added.
O2 send a text to you taking you to a website to view the picture. This is just so old fashioned. When I tell people I cant send them a picture from it they are just so surprised.
Conclusion
The apple iPhone is a fantastic gadget but I believe Apple has concentrated on making it browse the web, play your music, and use 3rd party applications that they have negelected the key phone features. After all the iPhone is a phone, it even has phone in its name!!
So please can you take note of what I have said in this email and implement these key features.