User Experience - Mobile Phone and Text Messaging

When it came to the actual phone features of the iPhone, I was somewhat disappointed to discover a big problem with the way the phone handled the data transfer over EDGE when a call came in.

It took me a few days to notice, but it didn't take long to confirm. The problem is that if there is a long EDGE connection (downloading a big web page or a large email) and a call comes in, if the EDGE connection isn't terminated within the time of two rings, the call is routed to voicemail. The EDGE connection will complete, but there will be no notice of a missed call. It is easy to replicate, just turn WiFi off and download a big page and then call the phone's number. Note that if you have WiFi on and are connected via 802.11, this will not occur.

I replicated this five times. The page that I typically used was a bandwidth test from DSLReports.com. I would pick the 600K test and then call the phone, and at the third ring, it would reroute the call to voicemail. It would seem as if I had sent the call to voicemail, but the phone got no notice at all that there was an incoming call.

This is a big problem because now, not only do I miss calls I would have otherwise wanted to answer, but it also gives the caller the impression that I sent them to voicemail - that I'm blowing them off and their call isn't that important. It might not be an issue for me and my friends, but in a professional context this could be a huge issue.

This issue may not be related directly to the iPhone, but rather the EDGE network and AT&T. I called Apple and they said that this isn't a bug. Rather, it is how the network is designed. I asked the support representative if he would put in a ticket to have the engineers look at it and see if there was something they could do. He said he'd put it in the notes and then hopefully it would be reviewed and sent up the chain. If Apple and AT&T can work together to make something like visual voicemail work, why can't they cut off the data link when there is an incoming call and route the call in?

Outside of this one bug, the actual phone operation is smooth. The iTunes software will bring over contacts from MS Outlook on the PC, MS Entourage on the Mac, as well as the built in Address Book on the Mac and sync them to the phone. I had to clean up and add to my contact list, since the last time I updated it was a year ago when I got my previous phone. You can assign pictures to contacts; I was able to take a picture of my dad and assign it to his name in the address book.

The Phone widget has five sections, Favorites to store a subset of your contacts that you call most frequently. Adding users to the favorites list is done by clicking the plus at the upper right and selecting a person and phone number (home, mobile, work).

The Recents menu is an excellent example of how call logging on a mobile device should work. At the top you have a filter to view all incoming and outgoing calls, or just the calls you have missed. The list shows the name or number, as well as the most recent time or day they called. Red indicates a missed call, and touching the name will call that person back. Touching the blue arrow on the right will provide you the contact details for that person or phone number. From here you can do any number of things, for a phone number you can create a new contact or add it to an existing contact, you can view the day and time the person called, and text the person.

The contact list is quick to scroll through, and touching the letters along the right side of the phone will advance you that letter. Because the letters are small, I found that you can hold your finger against the screen and move it up and down along the letters until you get to the letter you are looking for.

One thing that the iPhone doesn't have is a one-touch speed dial found on many typical phones. The closest you'll get is the favorites list.

Visual voicemail is a nice feature. You get a list of voicemails with the contact name or phone number, and you simply touch to listen. The visual voicemail menu also gives you the interface to setup your voicemail greeting. You can record a custom message to play whenever your voicemail answers the call.

Call quality has been good so far. The only issue I had is with calling the XBox support center (which routes the calls over VoIP to India). The combination of the cell phone and VoIP to India seemed to create a situation where myself and the support technician couldn't hear each other and we just hung up. I called back on my land line and was able to get through (the call quality still wasn't good even on the land line, but it was passable).

The text message capability is very good on this phone as well. The phone stores text messages in a more instant message style, with conversations as opposed to individual messages.

The keyboard and text suggestion features work very well, just as they do when typing an e-mail. You can initiate a text message session from the SMS application, or from a contact by pressing the Text Message button.