My iPhone nits

The iPhone LandethI’ve had my iPhone about a month now and I’ve hesitated to add yet another “I love my iPhone so much it changed my life forever” post to the blogosphere.

Sadly, here I am. Posting. About how great the iPhone is.

Well, actually… this post is dedicated to the minor, yet sometimes highly annoying nits that I’ve discovered. Hopefully this post will serve as a voice to Apple to encourage fixes/changes via the ongoing update process I hope to see with the iPhone.

1. STOP the vibration when I’m a call. There’s nothing more uncomfortable than having the phone up to your ear only to have vibration alerts kick off every time you get a text message. The first time it happened, I literally yelled out “ya-eyeee!” on a client conference call. Nice. I feel like I’m wearing an electrified dog collar when that happens.

2. In fact, just don’t alert me to anything via sound and/or vibration that anything is happening other than the call I’m actively on.

3. Allow me to rotate the screen when in my email. These days I get plenty of email messages that are basically web pages. Let me view them like Web pages.

4. Worse part of Mobile Safari – limited tabs and poor handling of exceed tabs error. Why pop a message to me saying too many tabs are opened rather than just loading the newly requested page into the last window/tab I had open? Why not prompt me with a message asking me where to put the page? Simply failing out is unfriendly.

5. Give me a way to sort my contact list. (Does this exist already?) I don’t necessarily want to only sort by last name. Sometimes I can’t remember the last name of that guy that works at this company who I met at that conference. Help me out! (UPDATE: To clarify, I mean sorting on the fly – Spike points out a tip for doing this on a fixed basis in the comments)

6. If I’ve gotten a visual alert (new text message, for instance) while on a call, I can’t end the call until I clear the alert message out of the way. This could lead to uncomfortable silence at the end of a call, which is not at all good considering my propensity to say “…and good day, sir!” before disconnecting. Much less dramatic when I have to ask them to wait while I clear my alerts.

7. My kingdom for some options on how the SMS messages are displayed. For whatever reason, I think my messages are from the other guy and vice versa. Something about the color schemes. Please please let me have some control over that.

Seriously though, these nits aside (except for #1 – seriously Apple, fix that ASAP!), the device really is amazing. I’ve been saying that it makes every other phone ever produced feel like they had absolutely zero user testing before release.