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#5: Speakerphone

Compared to other cell phones, the speakerphone is embarrassing. It isn’t loud enough and the proximity of the speakers to the microphone sometimes creates echoes. Apple chose to put the external speakers at the bottom of the iPhone, where your microphone is, instead of near the top or the sides. I’m sure with the tight packaging of the iPhone they were limited in their choices, but it’s still too bad. I would have loved to see NXT technology here, with the entire iPhone face acting as a speaker, that technology could also be used to provide haptic feedback for the iPhone touch screen. Too bad they didn’t consult us first, before we did our reduction to practice. Maybe next time.

The holes for the speakers are also more style than function. They are big enough to pickup lint from your pocket, but too small to clean the lint out. We would have preferred a fine metal mesh grill, that would keep the lint out, while also being less restrictive. Since the black plastic part of the iPhone is removable, there is some hope for availability of a replacement part.

#6: No copy and paste

We love the iPhone interface and think the keyboard actually works, but still typing a series of long urls into your emails is a pain. You can share links, but only one at a time. It doesn’t seem like having the ability to copy and paste text should be an advanced feature, this was how Apple started out with the first graphical wysiwyg word processors. Hopefully this bug will be fixed soon, I didn’t say upgraded since this should have been recognized as a vital feature. Apple really likes to tell you what you need and don’t need, kinda like the one button mouse.

#7: Ringtones

Admittedly some, okay many ringtones can be utterly annoying. Apple’s built in ringtones aren’t bad, but we need the ability to choose our own ringtones. Nearly every single phone on the market today can use mp3 ringtones. The hacked iPhones have already added this feature, so the only reason I can see why Apple hasn’t done it yet is that they want to charge people money for ringtones. They must be trying to develop their own DRM system for ringtones. Hmm…who’s starting to sound like the big bad monopoly now?

#8: Voice recording

Take an ordinary 5.5G iPod, throw a microphone on it, and you now have a voice recorder. The iPhone is an iPod… it has a microphone… but no voice recorder.