Free at last! Finally I’ve joined the Apple army–I’ve got my first iPhone.,

For the past two years I’ve been shackled to an AT&T contract for a Samsung Blackjack II smart phone, which uses the Windows Mobile 7 operating system.  A few weeks ago the contract expired and on the day I went to my local AT&T shop and upgraded to the 3G iPhone.

Let me say first how much I love the phone, for all the reasons you’ve either experienced or heard about—the rich, fluid interface, the ease of adding new applications, the bazillion apps in the App store (My favorite one so far is “Flashlight,” which just turns the screen bright white so you can use the phone as—you guessed it—a flashlight.)

Now, here are five gripes I have with the phone that hit me right away.  These are obvious clear faults with the customer experience that should be easy, easy to Apple to fix.  We’ll see if they do:

1. The Keyboard.  Using the virtual touch screen keyboard can be maddening.  I’m a big guy with big fingers and I make mistakes at least once every ten keystrokes.   The problem is a little bit better when you switch to the horizontal alignment, and the auto-complete function cleans up common mistakes almost without noticing.  But the difference between a push button keyboard—even that itty-bitty one on the old Palm smart phone—is major.
2. No Flash.  None.  What the heck?  A lot of media outlets still use substantial amounts of Flash in their Websites, and of course Flash is verboten in Apple store apps, so no Flash on the iPhone.  It’s a dispute between Adobe and Apple and both sides ought to see how stupid this is.  Apple is finally allowing the firsts few apps that are allowed to use work-arounds to use Flash, but this just leads to the third major gripe I’ve got.
3. Closed system for applications.  Apple can get away with a closed, tightly controlled marketplace for applications for awhile.  But pretty soon the amount of content and the extensions available on open phone systems—here comes Google’s Android—will begin shifting the center of gravity away from iPhone and iTunes and just like AOL, Apple will have to figure out what to do in a new, open world.  I can only imagine how much better the already rich world of iTunes and the App Store would if this were truly an open system.  Apple would be to mobile apps what Amazon is e-commerce.
4. Charging the Battery.  I plug the charger into one AC outlet and it charges.  I plug it into the outlet next to it and it won’t.  I plug it into a third socket and it shows it charging, but in the morning it’s not only not charged, it’s lost power.  I went to my local Apple store, they replaced the adapter plug, but the problem persists.  Ghost in the machine.
5. iPhone Apps that won’t go horizontal.  If you haven’t seen the iPhone, one of the most beautiful, wonders delights of using it is that if you tip it sideways the screen rotates sideways as well.  This also allows you to “stretch” the screen using to fingers, the way John King did with that very cool CNN Election Map.  Reading Websites is terrific this way.  But most of the iPhone apps, including ones from bigshots like Sports Illustrated don’t have a horiztontal mode.  Irritating.

None of these five gripes makes the iPhone anything other than twice as good as the Windows Mobile 7 or Crackberry operating systems.

As mobile becomes more and more the primary interactive interface we use in daily life (and that day has already arrived for millions of people) the iPhone will blaze the trail

Hopefully with a few improvements to solve problems like these.

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