living with a pushy iPhone

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The latest release of the iPhone software has been out for a couple of weeks now. As I mentioned before, I didn't jump to an iPhone 3G, so I'm just running the v2 software on my v1 iPhone. Now that I've been living with it for a couple of weeks, I'm mostly happy with it.

This is probably just me, but the single thing that I've wanted the most is Exchange on my iPhone. The App Store is a nice-to-have, but not essential. (In fact, as of this very second, I can't get any app downloaded from the App Store to launch, so I'm in the middle of restoring my iPhone to see if that will fix it. Restoring takes forever!) I've been dying to have Exchange push to my phone. Push email isn't the killer app for me, it's push calendar invites. I kept my iPhone synced pretty well, but there's always an updated calendar invite at the last minute — someoone cancels, changes rooms, whatever. Not having push calendar meant that I was never 100% certain that I was looking at the latest and greatest (especially since the latest and greatest could be less than five minutes old).

Having push email has meant that I've had to make some changes to my usage. Push email is a great way to run through a battery charge if you get a lot of email. But the push only works for your inbox, not for your complete folder structure. This is actually a pretty big benefit in terms of battery life. I've always been a big user of rules, but I had to go in and make sure that I was using server-side rules so that only things that I really care about end up in my inbox on my iPhone.

I have a few annoyances with my Exchange mail on my iPhone.

  • I have a huge folder directory structure on my Exchange account. I have more than 30 folders just for incoming email, and more than 100 additional folders for filing things. Navigating my folder structure can be tedious on my phone. I'd love to be able to collapse folders so that I don't always have to see all of my subfolders.
  • Likewise, navigating between folders is less than pleasant. If I'm deep into my folder hierarchy and want to check my inbox, I've got a bunch of tapping to do.
  • The offline email story is less than robust. I fly a lot. I'd really like to be able to do some email management via my iPhone when it's offline. I can't move or delete messages while offline. Everything else that hooks up to my Exchange account can do that happily, why can't my iPhone?
  • I get a lot of email traffic to certain folders. I tend to deal with those folders all in one go: sit down, read through everything, and handle it appropriately (move, delete, whatever). If I'm really doing a lot at once, the iPhone can't keep up. I haven't figured out what the threshold is, but somewhere after deleting 20 emails in a row, I'll start getting errors that emails can't be deleted. This is pretty painful when it happens. It usually requires quitting mail, waiting a bit, then going back into it and figuring out where it stopped deleting so that I can get started again.

Calendar is mostly unchanged from v1, it's simply adding push to it. Which means that my complaints about the calendar are still here:

  • Calendar events support basic recurrence, but I'm missing the recurrence patterns that I usually use, such as "first Monday of the month".
  • Time zone support is minimal. I travel a lot, and I've been back and forth to the East Coast a few times. Scheduling a meeting in another time zone would make my life a lot better. Currently, I schedule everything in my home time zone, and hope that I'm bright enough to be able to look at my calendar and perform the mental arithmetic to be able to figure out what time the meeting is in whatever time zone I'm in.
  • Why can't it suggest a free time? I've got lots of calendar events, so having it tell me that my next available open hour is at 8pm would be nice. This is a feature that I absolutely adore in My Day, and have come to rely on it.

Now that I'm in Exchange push, I've noticed a few additional issues with Exchange calendar invites:

  • My iPhone isn't great about recognising when I've accepted an invite elsewhere. It doesn't seem to matter where I've accepted it from (I've even been accepting directly from Outlook, which I never use, to see if it was a difference in how OWA or Entourage were dealing with invites). Every so often, I'll get an invite, act on it as I normally do, and still see the new invite badge on my iPhone. I have to act on it from the iPhone to get rid of it, which worries me that the meeting organiser now has two separate responses from me.
  • I can't delete a single instance of a recurring event. It's all or nothing. How often do I need to reschedule my weekly meeting with my manager? (Sorry, boss.) This one really annoys me.
  • Cancelled meetings stay on my calendar, there's no 'remove from calendar'. Give me my hour back!
  • I would love to be able to send invites from my phone. I'm in a meeting, I only have my phone with me, I realise that I need to schedule another meeting with someone else ... and I have to wait until I get back to my computer to do it. If I'm really feeling keen, I can do it through OWA on the iPhone, but I'm not usually that keen.

Contacts support is good but not great. I've got a big address book (1000+ contacts), and there's an obvious performance lag when scrolling through them. I've also noticed that my iPhone doesn't update my contacts when only the notes section has been changed. I use notes extensively in my contacts, so this is quite disappointing.

I had really hoped that the new version of the iPhone software would bring us tasks and notes. But no, that's just a pipe dream. The notes app on the iPhone is entirely useless to me without sync. I've currently got more than 50 notes in Entourage, ranging from the Caltrain shuttle schedule to a vague stab at my research schedule for the rest of the year. Likewise, with a complete lack of task support at all, let alone task sync, I'm on my own. There are third-party apps that try to fill this need, but none of them quite meet my needs.

In all, I'm still quite happy with my iPhone. I think it has some major shortcomings as an enterprise device, but I'm hopeful that they'll get fixed.