GoGoGadgets

There are the normal few things that everyone absolutely hates about the iPhone OS, like no multitasking and so on. But, there are a few small factors that I’ve run across in my usage that are very minor but make me want an android phone more and more.

First off exchange.

We all know that it was a big deal to businesses when Apple announced the fact that you could use your exchange server from work to push your mail contacts and calendars to your phone and vise versa. But why should 90% of us care? Because of Google and battery life. Just thinking about it it makes sense that using push instead of fetch helps your iPhone survive for more than 2 hours. As of relatively recently Google started to allow us to set up our gmail accounts as exchange accounts on our iPhone which is good for many reasons, even if you don’t use your gmail account for contacts and calendars. Although applications like Busysync or BusyCal make it easy to do that on a mac. Unfortunately, on windows I don’t care about finding an awesome application like BusySync. You can try syncing them with Sunbird by doing this. Mainly using their exchange service allows you to enable complete push service straight to your phone. Awesome right? Yes, but, like most people I have multiple gmail accounts for multiple reasons. I have a school email, an important one, some domain emails, etc. All of which I would love to set up as exchange accounts. If you’re well informed you know the first issue, the iPhone doesn’t allow more than one. Why not? They’d all be the same server.  It wouldn’t be too difficult to pull ONLY mail from two different places on the same server. Do you know why I KNOW this would work? You can set exchange and MobileMe at the same time. I know they’re not the same protocol but it does the same thing. You can sync both contacts and calendars from both places at the same time! How is that different?? You can even set up multiple MobileMe accounts. Don’t get me wrong I love my MobileMe account I wouldn’t ever want to be without it. But at the same time I have 6 other gmail accounts I would like to set up as exchange accounts, EVEN if they didn’t let me sync my contacts and calendars. Aside from that issue there’s another probably not as well known. For those of you with an iPhone with multiple email accounts I’m sure you’ve seen this but here’s the issue.

You know that you get used to where the accounts are so your fingers are almost automated. Think of it as someone changing where your keyboard keys are one day and having to relearn them. Difficult, right? Yes. The order of my accounts has only changed once since I got my first generation iPhone about 3 years ago. So why am I talking about this?  Because Apple doesn’t care about people who want to organize these. I can deal with having to add them in the order I want them. I know it sucks but it’s not the end of the world.  But there’s a very small factor with exchange accounts that kill it for me. Every exchange account I add goes directly to the bottom of the list. Let that sink in.  This means that if I make an exchange account, presumably my most important email, IT GOES TO THE BOTTOM OF MY LIST completely destroying my desired order.

Like I said before I love my MobileMe account, I love it’s integration with my mac and my iPhone. So naturally when I wanted to store groups of emails in folders in the cloud I choose the company that has a support infrastructure. Here’s my issue, I’ll get these project emails to various gmail accounts or other accounts all on my phone. When I’m on my computer I can just drag and drop the email that comes to my design account to the necessary project email folder stored on my MobileMe account. Awesome right? Yes. What if I receive that email on my phone and want to file it for later use? Apple says no. I cannot move emails from different accounts between each others folders?!? That goes along with the common issue of no unified inbox, something that Steve said should happen in the famous quote “Yep.”
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