BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: May 2006
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After 5 weeks with my iPhone, I finally got around to compiling and submitting my list of bug reports and feature requests to Apple. I thought I'd post a copy below in case anyone has any thoughts, feedback, etc. (note: they're not listed in order of importance/priority):
BUG REPORT - PLAYLIST -- In iPod/Playlists, I have my iTunes smart playlist "Top 25 Most Played" set to sync to iPhone automatically. However, instead of the actual Top 25 songs being synced, the "Top 25" playlist on my iPhone is just 25 random songs from my iTunes library, including several that haven't been played more than once or twice. I have tried deleting the playlist from iPhone and re-syncing as well as deleting the playlist in iTunes and re-creating it, but this bug persists. BUG REPORT - CALENDAR SYNCING -- When syncing Calendar events created on iPhone, such events are supposed to be synced to the iCal calendar specified in the iTunes preference pane. However, in my experience, such items are being synced to the bottom-most calendar in my iCal calendar list. For me, that calendar is one called "U.S. Holidays", which is a read-only calendar that is downloaded/updated automatically via Apple.com. *This creates a potentially serious problem: Events can be synced from iPhone to iCal and then get overwritten/deleted when the read-only calendar is updated.* MINOR PROBLEM - HAIR CAUGHT IN BEZEL -- My (very short) sideburns often get caught in the bezel while I'm talking on the phone. Not the end of the world but a minor annoyance nonetheless. EASE OF USE/FEATURE REQUEST - ADDRESS BOOK/CONTACTS -- Just as Address Book is a default dock item, I would like to see Contacts as a main-screen app on iPhone. It seems counterintuitive to have to go into the Phone app to find, add or edit a contact since iPhone obviously does a lot more than make calls. FURTHER, I would like Contacts to be better sorted. E.g., when I'm in the Phone app, I'd like *only* the contacts with a phone number to appear in the contacts list. Likewise, if creating an email, I'd like *only* those contacts with an email address to appear in the list. For people with large contacts lists (I have 1,500-plus), this would make finding contacts much easier. FEATURE REQUEST - MESSAGE WAITING INDICATORS ON UNLOCK SCREEN -- I like that the Unlock screen tells me if I missed any calls or text messages but I don't like that I need to unlock the screen to see if any emails are waiting. I would like to see a simple 3-icon message-waiting status bar added to the Unlock screen so I can see, without unlocking the phone, if I have missed any calls (Phone), text messages (Text) or emails (Mail). (Obviously, Phone, Text and Mail are the only three apps/icons that might have messages waiting and need attention.) FEATURE REQUEST - DASHBOARD -- As much as I like all of the available iPhone apps, the main screen obviously has limited space. I'd like to see Contacts moved to the main screen (see above) and perhaps a Dashboard-type feature added in which apps like YouTube and Stocks (and other widget-type apps added to iPhone in the future) can reside off the main screen. BUG REPORT - CALENDAR ALARMS -- I have iCal set to sync all calendars to iPhone but the other day an iCal alarm that I had set to remind me of an event 90 days in the future did not show up on iPhone. The alarm/reminder appeared on my PowerBook as it was supposed to but it never appeared on my iPhone that day. BUG REPORT - INCONSISTENT ORDERING OF PHONE NUMBERS & EMAIL ADDRESSES IN CONTACTS -- Whereas phone numbers and email addresses are listed in a consistent manner in Address Book (e.g., always Work, Mobile, Home, Work Fax, etc. for phone numbers, or Work, Home for email addresses), phone numbers and email addresses in Contacts on iPhone appear to be listed in descending order from the most recently added phone number or email address to the least recently added. This creates odd/counterintuitive situations where Home Fax or Work Fax is listed as the top phone number for a contact. I would like to see all phone numbers and email addresses listed in a consistent manner in all contact entries (preferably matching the sorting in a user's Address Book). BUG REPORT - INCONSISTENT PHONE NUMBER FORMATTING -- This is minor, but phone number formatting is not consistent from Address Book to Contacts on iPhone. E.g., I have phone numbers formatted as 123.456.7890 in Address Book but they currently get re-formatted as (123) 456-7890 on iPhone. FEATURE REQUEST - TEXT MSG DELIVERY CONFIRMATION/STATUS -- I really like the Text app on iPhone; it's far and away the best text messaging app I've ever used. However, it seems to be missing a key feature: Delivery confirmation/status for sent text messages. With Verizon, for example, I could click on any text message and find out if it's been delivered and, if so, the exact time it was delivered. On iPhone, no such confirmation is available, which leaves users wondering if an unanswered message was delivered, or if the recipient's phone is off, etc., etc. FEATURE REQUEST - ABILITY TO SAVE VOICEMAIL MESSAGES AS AUDIO FILES -- Visual voicemail is outstanding but one thing would make it better: The ability to save a message(s) to iTunes as an .mp3 or other file. Occasionally, I find myself wanting to save a voicemail message for business or sentimental reasons. Right now, voice messages are stored on iPhone but there's apparently no way to save them permanently (or, like with Verizon, to re-save them indefinitely in my voicemail box). EASE OF USE - AUTOMATIC SYNCING OF MOVIES TO iPHONE -- While everything else seems to sync from iTunes to iPhone automatically, I've noticed that to sync a movie newly-added to iTunes, such movies need to be enabled manually in the iPhone panel in iTunes. This has resulted in newly-added movies not being added to my iPhone when I assumed they had been synced over. I understand space is limited on iPhone and that might be the reason for the lack of auto-syncing of movies, but perhaps a dialog box could appear asking if the user wants a newly-added movie synced to iPhone. This would avoid using up iPhone space unnecessarily while also ensuring a newly-added movie gets synced if the user wants it to be. FEATURE REQUEST - ABILITY TO DISABLE THE "DELETE THIS MOVIE?" DIALOG BOX -- This dialog box is nice and makes sense for large, full-length movies that might take up 500MB or 1GB of space, but I have several small (5MB) movie clips on my iPhone that I will want to keep permanently. It would be great to be able to disable the "keep/delete" dialog box, or at least have a "keep forever" option added to the dialog box that could disable the "keep/delete" box on a movie-by-movie basis. FEATURE REQUEST - ABILITY TO DELETE INDIVIDUAL CALLS FROM "RECENTS" MENU -- As in the Mail app, I'd like an Edit button added to the Recents menu which would allow me to delete individual calls from my Recents menu. This would be helpful for a lot of reasons; e.g., if I dial a wrong number, I'd like to be able to delete it immediately, *without* needing to use the Clear All option that deletes my entire call history. FEATURE REQUEST - ABILITY TO TURN EMAIL SIGNATURE OFF FOR A PARTICULAR MESSAGE -- Given the tediousness of deleting large blocks of text on iPhone, it would be great if an email signature could be disabled for any given outgoing Mail message via a menu option or button in Mail. FEATURE REQUEST - JUNK MAIL FILTERING FOR MAIL -- No explanation necessary. BUG REPORT - ERRORS CAUSE MAIL TO STOP CHECKING FOR NEW MAIL -- Two or three times now, Mail's attempt to check for new mail has failed for some reason. This apparently causes Mail to *completely* stop checking for new mail as regularly scheduled (every 15 minutes, etc.) unless/until the next time the user manually opens Mail, which automatically triggers the check-for-new-mail mechanism. Obviously, this leads to a catch-22: A user might not click into Mail for hours if there's no new mail showing, but Mail apparently won't check for new mail until the user opens the Mail app. (I've previously recommended this for the desktop Mail.app and will do so again for iPhone's Mail app: Some type of warning icon should show up on the Mail icon, just like the numbers that show up indicating new mail, to alert the user whenever Mail.app or iPhone's Mail app fails to successfully check for new email.) BUG REPORT - THE MAIL APP OFTEN CHECKS FOR NEW EMAIL TWICE IN UNDER A MINUTE -- This isn't a bug, per se, so much as a limitation or a counterintuitive/counterproductive feature right now. Whereas Apple recommends checking email as infrequently as possible to conserve battery life, Mail's check-for-new-email-every-time-it's-opened feature is self-defeating right now. E.g., I have Mail set up to check for new mail in 15-minute intervals. If my iPhone beeps to alert me that new email(s) are waiting and I click into Mail, that immediately triggers Mail to check for new mail yet again, which might only be 10 seconds after Mail's last new-email check. If checking for new email is such a battery drain, I'd like Mail to stick to the set intervals and *not* check for new mail every single time I click into Mail. FEATURE REQUEST - HAVE CHECKING FOR NEW MAIL HAPPEN ON A SET SCHEDULE -- Related to the prior item above and given that checking for new mail can automatically happen no often than every 15 minutes, I'd like to know exactly when the Mail app is checking for new mail. E.g., if I have Mail set to check my email every 15 minutes, I'd like it to always happen at :00, :15, :30 and :45 past the hour. That way, if I glance at my iPhone at 3:18 or 6:43, I'll know that Mail was either just checked or is about to be checked. |
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Rocket Surgeon
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: The Canadark
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BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: May 2006
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That's funny, but not really a solution. What am I supposed to do, shave all the way up to an inch higher than my ear? It's not like I've got the Elvis Presley 'burns going; I have short-cropped hair and sideburns that extend no longer than 1 inch past the top of my ears.
I knew people would laugh at that item but I've seen similar complaints elsewhere. It's only a minor problem but one I had never encountered with any previous cell phone. I'll be talking and then, Ouch! Last edited by apple007 : 2007-08-11 at 11:47. |
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Formerly CoachKrzyzewski
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feature request: send a text message to multiple contacts simultaneously. You have NO IDEA how aggravating this is until you want to organize a game of basketball or dinner with some friends and you have to type up the same message 5-6 times. It should work the same way as email... just have a little plus sign on the right of the "to" field and add contacts to your hearts content. Ideally it would create a new conversation and all replies would get shown on that page (similar to a chat room in ichat...), in different colors for each person. This may not be possible with the text infrastructure cingular has, but sending a mass text is definitely possible and a terrible thing not to have.
that's my biggest complaint so far. |
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BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: May 2006
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Just noticed another minor bug and sent it off to Apple:
BUG REPORT - ALBUM ORDERING IN PHOTO APP -- If I create a new album in iPhoto and then drag it into its proper place alphabetically and then sync with iPhone, the new album still ends up at the bottom of the iPhone's album list instead of in the same order as in iPhoto. A user needs to go into the Photo pane in iTunes to re-order the photo album properly. This seems counterintuitive; seems like ordering of photo albums on iPhone should automatically mirror the ordering in iPhoto. (This bug relates to iPhoto '06; perhaps this problem does not exist in the just-released iPhoto '08.) |
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Less than Stellar Member
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BUG REPORT: It doesn't remind me to take my Xanax.
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Member
Join Date: Jul 2004
Location: SF, CA
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You know that you can have the phone alert you when you get new email right? (Settings > Sounds > New Email). I turned off that one early, so I forget if it persists an indicator on the screen, e.g., even if the phone is muted. |
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Less than Stellar Member
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BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: May 2006
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Nope; not a bug. Go into Clock and set an Alarm.
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Actually, there's plenty of Unlock-screen real estate to have both the message previews and a little 3-icon status bar, perhaps right under the time (or even tiny icons in the menu bar up top). Exactly. |
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BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: May 2006
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Less than Stellar Member
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I solved my problem by rearranging my calendars in iCal. Does that not work for you? It's not a fix, but just a workaround - since the vast majority of the appointments I create on my iPhone are "sessions" (as in individual therapy sessions), I moved that one to the bottom to get most of my iPhone created appointments in the right category. Try it and see how it works.
edit: I just read your post from before and you say it didn't work. Hmm. Quit and restart iCal AND iTunes before trying the rearranging. I think iTunes being open keeps the changes from sticking in iCal. |
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BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: May 2006
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As I mentioned above, I had tried the re-ordering workaround back on July 7 but it didn't seem to take. I guess quitting both apps is the key quirk to the workaround. (I was having a similar ordering problem with iPhoto-to-Photos syncing, but I was able to fix that one by playing around with both apps *open.* Seems to be some very quirky ordering in iPhone, whether it's this Calendar bug, the ordering of Photo albums, or even the intra-card ordering of Contacts data (see my bug list above for the Photos and Contacts bugs).) In any event, this is one nasty bug. I had created some events on my iPhone last night and then synced with iCal. As described above, the events were synced to the wrong calendar in iCal (a read-only calendar called "U.S. Holidays") and then the read-only calendar performed its daily update/refresh, which *overwrote/deleted* my iPhone-created events. I then re-synced my iPhone (after updating a few contacts), and since iCal had been updated more recently than Calendar, the iPhone-created events were completely wiped out of Calendar on my iPhone. So instead of backing them up, they were wiped away as if they had never existed. Thanks again for the workaround. I guess it's to Apple's credit that there aren't a lot more of these types of bugs in a first-gen, v1 release. This Calendar bug and the iPod/"Top 25 Most Played" playlist bug (above) are the only really nasty bugs I've encountered, and the latter playlist bug certainly is not earth-shattering. EDIT: As 'torifile' noted back on July 6, the Calendar preference in iTunes always defaults to one's bottom-most calendar in iCal. Thus, re-ordering one's iCal calendars, with iTunes open and possibly even with it closed, will break one's Calendar preference and possibly *trigger* the above bug for people who weren't having it in the first place. People need to be very careful or they could find themselves missing a lot of data. Last edited by apple007 : 2007-08-13 at 12:20. |
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BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: May 2006
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The above 90-day alarm/reminder that didn't go off last week is in my "work" calendar. Perhaps only the alarms/reminders from one's "preferred" iCal calendar go off on iPhone (??). |
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Less than Stellar Member
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BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: May 2006
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Thanks again. "Disastrous" is the right word. Compared to some of the things people are griping about, I'm really surprised this bug hasn't received much attention. Perhaps you and I -- users who use iPhone heavily for business -- are in the minority, with others more concerned with the "play/fun" functions. This bug seems a hell of a lot more problematic than custom ringtones and some other things that are getting far more attention.
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Senior Member
Join Date: Dec 2005
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How many "bugs" with the iPhone can be updated with a software update...and how many would require me to wait for a new model entirely? I have heard of several issues besides what is on your list: no java/flash support, EDGE vs 3G network speed, only vertical typing when texting, ect...I want to know if buying the first iPhone version is worth it and if these issues can be solved, or should I wait for the newer model when they eventually release it? How long is Apple's contract with AT&T before it potentially could become a Verizon phone?
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BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: May 2006
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I don't have any real complaints with EDGE, and with WiFi connections available all over, I certainly wouldn't wait for a 3G version before getting an iPhone, *unless* the wait was also tied to waiting for an existing cellular contract to expire or something like that. As for the AT&T exclusive contract, I believe the initial announcement was two years, but others have speculated that AT&T has been granted up to a 5-year exclusive contract for iPhone in the U.S. |
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Member
Join Date: Oct 2005
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BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: May 2006
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I docked the iPhone again and the first thing I noticed was an all-orange Capacity bar in iTunes telling me my iPhone was full. (I knew that wasn't a good sign.) This was soon followed by a dialog box telling me my iPhone could not be synced because not enough space was available. However, not only did I know my iPhone not full, but I looked in the iPod section and all of my music and videos had been wiped, so I should have had 6-plus GB available. I tried disconnecting and re-connecting a couple times but no dice. I hated to do it, but I had to click the Restore button. To my surprise, that triggered a 92MB download of the iPhone's software, so restoring the iPhone certainly isn't the quick process I've gone thru a few times with my iPod. The restore went as advertised -- didn't lose any data or settings -- but it took a LONG time ... probably 90 minutes from start to finish, including re-syncing about 6GB of data. Not the end of the world, and my iPhone does seem a little snappier, but it was obviously an unpleasant surprise, and not what I was planning to do from 3:00 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. this morning. I stand by my iPhone comments (best device I've owned), but if I have to Restore this thing more than about once per year, I reserve the right to modify my stance. I'm just glad it didn't happen when I was short on time or on the road (or in a place without high-speed internet; that 92MB download to restore was kind of shocking). |
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BANNED
I am worthless beyond hope. Join Date: May 2006
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I have a bunch of music videos in iTunes. It seems like every time I play one of them, the file gets re-copied to my iPhone during the next sync. This doesn't seem to make sense; the only thing that would have "changed" about the file is its play count, and that shouldn't be stored as part of the file itself. (I have the "remember playback position" option unchecked, so it shouldn't be syncing for that reason.) Anyone else experiencing this?
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