peterskim

I’ve been an iPhone owner for a few weeks now. As many of you may know, I was opposed to getting an iPhone for a while but it’s the only non-BlackBerry smart phone that my company will officially support so it was my best option.

In general, I think the iPhone is a great device but it is not without areas for improvement. Here are the features which are currently missing from the iPhone that are the most important to me:

Push GMail and/or multiple Exchange/ActiveSync accounts
After having a BlackBerry for years, I guess I took push email for granted. Push email means that the servers will automatically send email to your device at the moment the server receives the email. You don’t have to go into an app to tell the servers to pull down the new email.

Yes, I know Google has found a workaround by using Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology to push your GMail to your iPhone, similar to how corporate email is set up to be pushed to iPhones. Unfortunately, the iPhone only supports one Exchange/ActiveSync account per device, so if you’re already using it for corporate email, you cannot also set up your personal GMail as a second Exchange account.

I’m sure if Google were not a direct competitor to Apple in the smart phone space, they would have come up with a better solution for this by now, but basically, if you’re heavily dependent on Google’s services (GMail, Google Voice, Google Docs), you should get an Android phone instead of an iPhone since the iPhone will always have second-class support for Google services.

Using an alternative From: address in the iPhone mail client
This one is just silly. Pretty much every email client out there supports setting up a separate From: address from the email address you are actually sending from. So one very common use case for this is when universities only give their alumni forwarding email accounts, rather than real email accounts. Your real email account might be peter@gmail.com but you always want people to send to and think you are sending from your university-associated forwarding account, peter@alumni.case.edu. I don’t want people to have any idea that I’m using GMail as my underlying email provider because it gives me the flexibility of changing email providers in the future without having to tell everyone I have a new email address.

While the iPhone is far and away the leader in certain aspects of smart phone technology (media player, web browser, app support), it still lags BlackBerry in being a premier email client. These two feature requests above are not terribly difficult to address, so hopefully Apple gets their act together and makes the iPhone a stronger competitor to the BlackBerry with regards to email.