Good but still lacking...
Husband (gadget freak and apple fan) bought me one - I was perfectly happy with the phone I had (mainly use it for calls, SMS, MMS and camera) as core functionality and batterylife were great. I was very sceptical but have to admit that (bar one major failing) the iphone is fab. It's so intuitive that my grandparents (if I had any) could use it, and everything on it works beautifully. Batterylife is excellent - even after a day spent at footie taking pics, flipping between Edge and wifi to find out scores of other matches managed to get home with 95%+ left.
My problem is that with the iphone the UK is an afterthought. Not only does every big manufacturer rip us off by just sticking a £ sign in to replace the $ sign (at a current exchange rate of roughly $2 to £1), but Apple either didn't bother to research the UK market or just decided not to care. The US may not bother with messaging (it amazes me how behind the UK they are on mobiles in general) but in the UK it's a fundamental function of a mobile phone. I can live with the qwerty keyboard (my nails were too long anyway and as someone else mentioned the iphones learns very quickly) but 1) can't send SMS to multiple recipients 2) can't forward SMS 3) can't cut and paste (OK, I don't think I've ever had a phone that could do this, but then all my previous phones allowed me to multisend/forward so I didn't need to) 4) can't delete a single SMS - quite cool the way the iphone displays and stores texts between two phones as a single 'conversation', but I'd still like the option of deleting one message rather than an entire 'conversation' and 5) can't send/receive MMS (hoping this will be a firmware upgrade rather than hardware when they get round to it).
This is all inconvenient-but-I'll-get-used-to-it stuff, but it just winds me up that Apple go to the trouble of designing an amazing UI and then add only the functions required by the most backward mobile market in the developed world. Oh, and then just change the currency sign so that, yet again, we're funding everyone else.
Rant over. :-)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
