Sen's Blog

First of all, I am not an apple hater. I’ve used iphone for a short period of time before, and I’ve done work on an Macbook pro. I understand the different design philosophy from apple, and I think I can live with it when I recently upgraded my 2-year contract with ATT. However, I have discovered (through the short period of time that I had with the device) that some of iphone’s function design flaws is outweighing its great aesthetic value. Today is the 3rd day I got my iphone 4s (I was using Samsung Captivate with customized ROM and Kernel before that, yes I am aware that I can Jailbreak my iphone but for iOS5.1.1, jailbreak is not release yet)

1. Automatically drop wifi when locked (to save power).

Apparently this problem has been brought up before (check out this post from 2008), once you lock your iphone, the device will maintain connected to wifi for about 10 minutes then automatically disconnect. There is apparently no way to have it set up to maintain wifi connection. You will still get your email notification pushed, but that’s through your mobile provider. If you are NOT on an unlimited plan, your monthly cap will just gradually be eaten away.

For home network, this is actually OK. Similar to the post above, it is the problem connecting corporal wifi network that is driving me crazy. Most corporal network allows you to connect to the wifi but you need to provide authentication when you open a browser (i.e., if you are using a laptop or an Android phone). For android and laptops, once you entered your credentials,  you stay connected until you move the device out of the wifi range or shut it down. For iphone, every single time the phone sleeps/automatically locks, I have to re-enter the credentials. Apple is very considerate in that the entering credential page automatically pops out, but still, on Android I don’t have to do this for 10 times a day!

Of course, one thing I can do is to turn off the automatic lock phone function. Then I suspect a fully charged battery will only last 5 hours or so, which is just unacceptable.

I hope that this can be fixed once the jailbreak is out. Otherwise I am going back to Android.

2. For f**k sake, changing to a customized ring-tone requires lots of work.

I understand that Apple is trying to get some money out of this ancient ring-tone business. But come on, it’s 2012 and apple is still expecting user to buy ring-tone? I only want to change my ring-tone to a simple piece of classical music, that is NOT copy-righted to anyone (strictly speaking, the copyright belongs to Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, .etc and they have expired so anyone may use them), is that asking too much? Zedge on Android allows this to happen easily. On iphone, there is Ring-tone++, where you can download the small 100KB ring-tone files, but then have to connect to your laptop, then sync throught itune. Seriously, Apple?

This problem is actually OK to me cause I don’t change my ring-tone that much–it only need to happen once for me. But it shows the design flaw. What is the usability guys from apple working on? Are they blind for monetary purposes? Seriously, how much of your revenue comes from ringtone sales? Do you think make user change ringtone easiler would increase or decrease your ringtone sales? People that buys ringtong of the most newly released song from itune will still buy it, user like me will still not buy it, but hold much less grunt to your product.

3. Battery life

This is a problem that is universal to all smart phones. The good-old days when you only have to charge your phone once a week is long gone. For my normal use, iphone 4s can last about 15 hours. That’s less than a day. Same use, on the Samsung Captivate (2 year old phone), it can last one day and a half (about 36 hours). Note that this incredible battery life (Oh man do the battery industry need to catch up) is only possible because I used customized ROM and kernel. The battery life on a stock Captivate would be similar to iphone 4s. It just I am expecting the jailbreak version to at least be as clean/good as the android Customized ROM and Kernel.

4. Why cann’t I lock the rotation in landscape?

It turns out that only since iOS4 that user can lock the screen in portrait mode (Android users would be like, “What? Android can do that (and landscape lock) since the beginning”, well, good for android). Even now, iphone 4s cannot be locked for landscape view. I found this out during using IMDB (my favorite app) in bed. The screen just rotates non-end. Admittedly, this is something that could be fixed by IMDB developer (similar to web-brower where you cannot turn your phone upside down). For viewing movie trailers (videos), I want to view it in landscape while lying down. Apparently that’s too much to ask from Apple. Screen rotation lock in both landscape and portrait are available by default on Android, even on WebOS (on the legacy HP touchpad), but not on iOS.

I simply wish that I would knew these differences between iOS and Android before I bought the iphone. Given there are so much information on the web, you’d think that there at least should be a few tech writers summarize them. Nope, everybody is generating text online but very few of them are actually accurate or useful, well, I’ll save that discussion about the broken web for another day.