top11 missing mail features for iPhone! *update*

6th of Aug, 2008ce* in: blog, ideas

• 11. NEW: cannot forward attachments

  Often, phone emails written in Japanese are delivered as “mime-attachment.txt”. Without any form of copy and paste I often forward mails to my computer for difficult kanji translation. When they arrive as attachments, I have no means of forwarding them.

• 10. E-Mail Names

  E-Mails are sometimes listed in the inbox under the email address and not the persons name, however clicking on the e-mail will show you their name not the e-mail address.

• 9. Heavy Data

  Replying to an e-mail always includes the senders message, this must be highly annoying for the recipient on a mobile phone, and increases data sent over the networks.

• 8. No Alert! :(

  Arriving e-mails don’t make the bell (or user editable) noise!! Only SMS do this, however in Japan people use e-mail in the same way other countries use SMS. So often, you don’t know if an email has arrived. Just a dull plunk noise that can’t be changed.

• 7. No Add to Contacts

  if someone sends you their e-mail address or phone number in an e-mail or SMS, when you click on it, iPhone wants to compose a new e-mail or call them, where as it should ask you if you want to save the email address to a new or existing contact, as well as calling/mailing them or canceling.

• 6. Emoji

  Japanese phones have the ability to send “emoji” which are basically a set of 100 or so smiley faces and icons. (that are also used on the Japanese equivalent to “WAP” mobile net to save bandwidth). Personally I don’t mind, save for the e-mails full of meaningless blank squares, which is annoying.

• 5. No Auto Draft (intermittent)

  When you have no reception or wifi and send an e-mail (for example on the train) sometimes the loading wheel just spins forever and the email is just lost, not saved as draft. Ideally the phone should know and not try to send and save a draft.

• 4. Contact Book is Slow

  Contacts list is insanely slow to load, I only have 151 contacts but it can take up to 10 seconds to load, before finding the email or number I need.

• 3. No Groups for contacts

  Adding a new contact does not let you file that contact away into a group (like “family” or “bitches”). In fact the only way to file a contact away into a group without adding them while in that group; sync with your computer’s address book; file contact into group; re sync with iPhone. (also you can’t make new photo groups [folders] and file photos, this all needs to be done on iPhoto)

• 2. Apple+C = no

  No copy and paste. Nuff said.

• 1. Arg the Pain!

  And number one, yep you might have guessed it; Japanese input hangs like a bastard. I can count 3 seconds between typing letters while the phone desperately searches some dark corner of the code libraries for the predictive Kanji. On a normal Japanese phone this is lightening-shit-off-a-shovel fast. This is the number one thing that needs to be updated as currently, it’s a royal pain in the arse for myself and people using the phone in Japanese, to type mails.

If you think about it they have had more than a year to make these bits better. Lets hope they do. (edit: 2.0.1 update didn’t list what was changed, no noticeable changes to the above)

meta