A while back I posted about my 5 favorite features of the iPhone…well why be so positive? For every awesome feature the iPhone has it’s got a serious drawback. Every piece of technology has it’s flaws and the iPhone is certainly no exception. Here’s a list of things I think the iPhone lacks in.

5. Third Party Apps

Ok so I know this is coming very soon – that’s why it’s #5 on my list. Finally we’ll see some real applications on the iPhone (even though we’re gonna have to pay for them…) Webapps don’t count…they’re webpages that couldn’t pass any sort of standards and are not crashing by such a thin thread that they can only work with a browser 2″ wide and 3″ tall that doesn’t allow plugins of any kind. It’s being fixed with the new upcoming patch along with Microsoft Exchange support and a bunch of other stuff…but that doesn’t make me feel any better about being too scared to jailbreak my iPhone and get all the cool stuff everyone else has had since August. I needed third party apps 9 months ago.

4. Buried Battery

The iPhone has a battery that is encased inside the phone among sensitive electronics and under glass. This means iPhone owners can’t replace the battery themselves, the iPhone must be sent out for repairs. We all know over time rechargeable batteries tend to hold less and less…it’s the reason your 3 year old laptop won’t play an entire DVD without needing to be plugged into the wall. So when the battery becomes depleted or malfunctions you’re stuck with no other option than taking it to an Apple store or sending it off. I don’t have an Apple store in my city so I’m either out of a phone for a few days while it’s getting ripped apart or I drive 3 hours to the nearest one for the weekend. Actually a road trip isn’t sounding all that bad right about now…

3. No Memory Expansion

Why not? Seriously…I mean, I doubt I’ll fill up all 8GB if I don’t try to transfer all my music to it at once…but if in the event I fill up my 8GB – I could easily expand it to 12GB with a 4GB micro SD card…so why isn’t this an option? Like I said, I doubt I’ll be filling up all 8GB any time soon but I don’t see some of you download-junkies deleting your latest episodes of “Lost” to accomodate your latest DVD-rip.

2. No Video Recording

I’m no paparazzi and I’m certainly not all about taking some video with my iPhone…but c’mon – I spent $499 on the thing when it came out, this SOB better do everything any other phone can and make it look easy. I can take some pretty stellar pictures with the camera as it is. 1200×1600 at 72DPI to be exact. It takes great outdoor photos at a mid to close range. It doesn’t have any zoom (expected…it’s a phone with a camera feature, not a camera with with phone features) and it doesn’t have a flash. Hell this camera has a flash on it and it cost 1/4 the price of an iPhone. Not only that, but it records video too… I don’t necessarily need to record video, but the fact that I can’t makes this non-existant feature a drawback worthy of my top 5.

1. Text Messaging

One of it’s high points is also one of it’s low points. The iPhone’s text messaging is great in the way it displays them and they’ve fixed one of the serious flaws with it, but that’s not to say it’s perfect. Far from it as a matter of fact. That’s why it’s my #1 complaint with the iPhone.

I’ll start with Multimedia Messages. You can’t send photos or videos to other people. You can’t recieve them either (well…in the conventional sense that is.) When someone sends you a multimedia message it actually is stored on a web server and you’re sent and address to it along with a username and password. This wouldn’t be so bad if the URL they gave you in the text was an active URL…you can’t click it and it open up the iPhone’s browser…no, you have to break out the traditional pencil and paper to write down the address, username, and password then to the menu then to Safari then to your multimedia message. This whole process takes way too long and is way to inconvenient. Imagine if in an email you couldn’t get the actual attachment, but had to actually tab to your browser and visit another website and with your written down temporary username and password retrieve the attachment…see the inconvenience?

Until recently you could not send a text message to multiple people. You talking about a pain in the ass…you had to type out the same exact message several times if you wanted to send it to several people. I don’t know if this was Apple’s way of trying to cut down on those mass “Happy Turkey Day!!” texts I get every Thanksgiving or “Happy New Year” mass texts that are sent out at midnight every single year. Either way…it certainly cut down on them – by cutting them out completely. Not to bitch about this any more because they have since added this feature to the current iPhone firmware.

Last but not least – you cannot forward text messages. Again, I firmly believe this is Apple’s way of cutting down on bad jokes that are sent across the airwaves via text about small children saying inappropriate things to their parents or that one about Mr. and Mrs. Claus that always seems to turn up around December. I’ve gotten a text more than once and been asked to forward it on to other people and after I explain to them that I can’t do such a simple fuction I’m usually presented with “but…you have an iPhone!” Yeah, well guess what? It doesn’t forward text messages.

I’m gonna go ahead and bundle my complaint of no iChat or some other messenger in with the texting complaints. Third party apps are on the way…as I noted in #5. Maybe we’ll see some good messaging programs coming to the iPhone.

So that’s that. I raved about the iPhone and now I’ve ranted about it. That’s my beef with the iPhone – what’s yours?