Smartphones and Cell Phones

Matthew Miller

What are your smartphone bothersome things?

By Matthew Miller | July 14, 2011, 6:35am PDT

Summary: There are things that frustrate us smartphone users and the guys at the 361 Degrees podcast focused on several in their latest episode.

I am a podcast junkie and enjoy listening to them as I run on the roads around my neighborhood. One of the newest podcasts I subscribed to is co-hosted by my good friend Rafe Blandford from All About Symbian and is called 361 Degrees. As I ran last night I listened to the latest podcast, episode 10, and thought I would ask my readers what they thought were their most bothersome things with smartphone platforms.

The 361 Degrees podcast features Ewan MacLeod from Mobile Industry Review and Ben Smith from Wireless Worker in addition to Rafe and is a great listen for all of you interested in the mobile space. The bothersome things they discussed were:

WiFi hotspots
MMS incompatibilities
Battery life
Mobile apps requiring constant connectivity
Context sensitive ringing

I have to agree with these and say that the more phones I use the more miserable battery life on smartphones is moving to the top of my list of frustrations. Android and Windows Phone 7 devices suck at battery life and this fact has me using Symbian and BlackBerry devices more and more today. I would use an iPhone, it has great battery life too, if it was on T-Mobile and when the iPhone 5 is launched I may be adding a carrier that supports it to get one.

What are your bothersome things and which one is the most frustrating for you?

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Topics

Smart Phone, Battery, Podcasts, Engineering, Smart Phones, Cellular Phones, Handhelds, Internet, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Hardware, Matthew Miller

Matthew Miller started using a Pilot 1000 in 1997 and has been writing news, reviews, and opinion pieces ever since.

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

tomlin21-24319035676893835085146735905770 11th Oct

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I quite like my iPhone

toddybottom Updated - 14th Jul

My biggest complaint is the horrible notification system. If iOS 5 works as advertised (and there is no reason to believe it won't, Apple hasn't exactly had to break any new ground here) then my #1 complaint about the iPhone will be rectified.

That would leave inconsistent mobile Safari performance as my only real complaint. I've noticed that ZDNet's comment system and Google+ perform very poorly on the iPhone and it isn't a connectivity issue. Something is actually taking up all the CPU to render the screen and respond to key presses. My iPad 2 doesn't suffer from this which makes sense since I believe the iPad 2 has a far superior processor (is that correct?).

All the other shortcomings in the stock iPhone (and there are a lot) have been fixed very satisfactorily with apps.

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

Aerowind 14th Jul

I absolutely LOVE my Android phone...but it does drain battery like nobody's business.

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ROOT IT

xtream101 15th Jul

@Aerowind I love my droid too. But I did root it for better battery life using cyanogenmod 7 ROM

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

bmgoodman 14th Jul

I hate the loss of easy syncing of Contacts and Calendar with Outlook *without* putting something in the "cloud". I don't *want* Google, Microsoft, or anyone to "help" me by keeping this information. They don't need access to e-mail addresses, birthdays, etc. and I don't trust them to keep things private and secure. Wow, how I miss the old days where I installed a small sync tool on my PC and that performed this task SO WELL.

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

joy.arizona@... 14th Jul

Two things about texting on my Android - when I tap the top conversation on the list, it gives me the conversation on the bottom of the list. And most annoying, when typing a text, it will randomly scroll to the first text in that conversation, and I have to scroll ALL the way down back to the bottom to continue typing where I left off. Takes a while when there are 600+ messages in the list.
Oh, and twice already it's deleted ALL of my texts, for no apparent reason - everything else on the phone was there.
Random Android bugs - that's my most bothersome smartphone thing...

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

sarllc 14th Jul

Syncing! And having it duplicate my contacts. when you have hundreds in your phone & then it duplicates more than half of them & sometimes to 5 times....ANNOYING!!!! and time wasting trying to straighten it out!
AND...when it deletes it from your phone or laptop!!!
UGH UGH UGH!!!!!

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

MDallmann 14th Jul

Battery life and cut & paste or lack there of in Android. Would it really make a phone so much more difficult to use if it were a little thicker but came with a battery that could make it through the day? And why is cut and paste so limited in where you can use it?

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

Cyrorm Updated - 14th Jul

My only frustration is that there is no Flash support for ARMv6 processors. Yes I know skyfire will work for most flash videos, but that won't work for Flash apps. Why isn't there a flash/flash lite version for people who have ARMv6 Phones?

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

Cylon Centurion 14th Jul

Everytime I plug into my computer's USB the battery starts charging. That's great, except I constantly plug in to transfer pictures off my phone, and I'd rather not trash the hell out of my battery.

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A few iOS gripes...

BillDem 14th Jul

The iPhone only syncs the calendar with Outlook on Windows machines. Why not sync with Windows Calendar, too? (Which actually ships with Windows...) Or Thunderbird? Or basically any other free/inexpensive calendar program on Windows? Not everyone uses Outlook at home, but most people sync their iPhones at home. That just shows a lack of careful thought on the part of Apple.

Even better, why not offer a better application than Windows iTunes for managing ALL of the content on these devices. That program was never meant to do everything it now does, and it doesn't do nearly enough of what we really need it to do. It was meant to put media on iPods and Apple has it trying to do dozens of other tasks, now. Frankly, it does all of them poorly, which is making Apple look pretty stupid. Heck, check out Palm Desktop from the late 1900's for a better example of how to sync data to a device than using even the latest version of iTunes.

When setting alarms in iPhone calendar, you can choose 1 hour or 2 hours prior warning, but not 1.5 hours. Why set this arbitrary limitation when you could seriously allow any time to be set just as easily? The controls for that already exist in iOS and are used extensively elsewhere. It just looks like the person who programmed Calendar didn't know what they were doing.

While we're on the subject of inconsistencies, it's retarded that the weather app icon always displays 73 degrees, when it could easily show the current temperature. The email icon shows how many emails I have. Why is this different?

Also, don't force the cloud on us. If I want something in the cloud, I will put it there myself. Read the daily headlines to find a multitude of reasons why the cloud is not the best place to store important personal data. Nothing on the Internet is secure. I don't want my personal devices uploading my personal data to cloud servers without my explicit consent.

My last major gripe about iOS is... no freaking Flash support, after half a decade of people complaining about it. All other tablets support Flash. Many other smart phones support Flash. Apple developers and/or decision makers just look stupid at this point. Do I hate Flash? Mostly. Do I still need it in order to view a lot of web sites? Absolutely. Just make it happen and stop being a bunch of stubborn morons about it, Apple. I hate that I have to use the Skyfire browser to get around the poor choices made by the over-inflated egos of Apple management. Even using Skyfire doesn't cover all of the places where Flash is needed.

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

John Hanks 15th Jul

@BillDem Sounds like a lot of good reasons to Not buy an iPhone.

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

drokkon Updated - 15th Jul

I have a Windows Phone, and none of those things bother me anymore:

-WiFi hotspot notification on my old Windows Mobile used to drive me nuts, but now it's an innocuous notification at the top that automatically disappears. The overall notification system for WP7 was great from the get-go and it's been fun to watch iOS play catch up.

-I rarely MMS, and when I do, it's to one of the other 5 Samsung Focus phones we have on our family plan, so no compatibility problems.

-My battery life is fine, but I'm not a world-traveler trying to use my phone as a primary computing device. I have a short commute and work on computers all day, so I'm usually using my phone to listen to a podcast, check email during lunch or after work, and playing a game when I'm waiting for something. I plug it in every night to charge and it still has at least half the battery remaining. When I DO travel, I'm thinking that the new battery saving features of Mango will rock.

-I've got tons of great apps on the phone (often rated "best" version of that app across platforms), and I'm not sure that any of them use some kind of "always on" connection.

Having said all that, 1 out of the 6 WP7 users on our family plan hates her phone. My stepsister, 17yo, laments all the things that her friends' phones (Android and iOS, presumably) do that hers doesn't. I think she's got issues with MMS (video), ringtones, etc. Mango should rectify most of her concerns and the rest of the adult users on our plan are 110% happy with our WP7 Samsung Focii, but for her, pre-Mango, "LIKE OMG THIS FONE SUXORS!"

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

drokkon 15th Jul

Having said that, my bothersome things are...WP7 growing pains, I guess. The first updates rolled out far too slowly and I have the occasional Wifi sync issue (which, I should note, WP7 again beat iOS to).

Seriously though, wow, I'm having trouble thinking of any aspect of my phone that bothers me and can't. Guess that's why the WP7 satisfaction rate is so high.

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RE: What are your smartphone bothersome things?

Palm Pre Plus User 15th Jul

Okay my Palm Pre Plus does have battery issues but I carry a spare and can pop it in as needed.

The big issue for me is the lack of editing of documents & spreadsheets. Thanks to DataViz pulling out of WebOS, I only have a reader. And, the substitute has failed to materialize to date, even for the newer versions of WebOS. All my old Palm smartphones had full editing ability.

And with the possible demise of Borders, I have another potential new problem. To get recently published books that I read on my Pre, I use Kobo which is affiliated with Borders. I do all my reading on my Pre and I worry that I will not be able to get recent best selling books for it in the future.

I agree with the other writers that I do NOT want to put my data on the cloud. I use a WebOS app to sync my calendar, address book, memos, and todo lists to my old Palm Desktop program on my PC. I use the Palm OS sync with Classic to sync everything else. My favorite old app that I maintain under Classic is Palm Quicken (no longer available for new users) precisely because it does not go anywhere besides my device and my computer.