I love my iPhone, but it does lack some important features and functions. That’s why I’ve put together this list of 25 fixes Apple should make to the iPhone.

Apple, if you read this, please consider these suggestions the next time you issue an iPhone update.

25 things wrong with the iPhone:

1. Can’t copy & paste text.

2. Except for the first and last SMS messages in a session, iPhone text messages lack timestamps.

3. iPhone’s Safari browser does not support Java or Flash, so you can’t watch videos or see parts of certain websites.

4. The on-screen keyboard can’t be used in landscape mode in applications other than Safari.

5. Vibrate mode for incoming text messages is weak.

6. Incoming text messages appear word-for-word on the screen upon receiving them, which may be a privacy issue for some.

7. No Undo function for when you’ve accidentally erased or mistyped text.

8. Scroll bars don’t appear in text fields in the browser, and there are no arrow keys to maneuver through text.

9. Can’t save usernames and passwords in Safari.

10. The YouTube app does not allow you to view or post comments on videos.

11. Can’t download or save Word or PDF documents. Why not add a My Documents folder for saving important files?

12. No spell check feature for web forms.

13. Can’t send more than one image in an email.

14. Photos can’t be edited or removed directly from the iPhone. You have to edit photos on your computer and then resync them.

15. The iPhone lacks a Find function for sorting through contacts, e-mails, calendar appointments and notes.

16. Can’t update your Facebook status via iPhone’s Safari browser. Facebook is a fast-growing social network, so I’m sure this is a real bummer for a lot of people.

17. No mass edit feature for handling calendar items, notes and e-mails.

18. Can’t search within web pages in the browser.

19. Its 3-day, expensive battery replacement plan.

20. Can’t highlight text.

21. Limited ringtones. Can’t set songs as ringtones.

22. Difficult to rewind and fast-forward through long audio and video files (like audiobooks and TV shows or movies).

23. No AIM or iChat application.

24. One too many steps to dial a contact.

25. Headphone jack is incompatible with non-Apple headphones.

iPhone Review: My Experience

It took me a while to get this iPhone review up, since I was busy driving back to the Apple Store and exchanging my new, slightly-defective iPhone for another.

Although I was super eager to explore my new gadget and write up an iPhone review, the iPhone I originally purchased had something loose in the USB port that brought it out of charge mode with even the slightest movement of the USB cable, so I was forced to return it.

I was the first person to go back to the store to report an iPhone-related problem, they told me, so the issue is most likely a rare one.

I’m not going to lie, though: the hassle of going back to the Apple Store was almost worth the thrill of unboxing two shiny new iPhones yesterday.

Click on images in my iPhone review to see them full-size.

Hello.

The iPhone and I first meet in the Apple Store at 6:30pm. A friendly Apple Store employee introduces us:

I purchased the iPhone for a total of $640.93, including sales tax.

iPhone Review & Unboxing

iPhone in Box

iPhone Box Contents

All the contents of the iPhone package fit nice and snugly inside the box.

iPhone & Included Accessories

The iPhone comes with a charging dock, a USB cable, an outlet charger and a pair of headphones with built-in microphone.

Starting Up iPhone

Upon activating the iPhone, a futuristic-looking Apple logo appears on the screen. The iPhone is now powered on.

There’s no denying it: the Apple iPhone is fun. It packs all your favorite widgets in one super-portable device, and it’s got some great functionality — most notably: the iPhone’s multi-touch screen, an accelerometer, and an on-screen keyboard. But the iPhone is not without flaws.

Continue reading my iPhone review for a full breakdown of the iPhone’s features, its downsides, and what you might expect if & when you get your own Apple iPhone.

Also in my iPhone review: I’ve addressed the questions you asked about the iPhone (see underlined sentences in the review).

Getting Started

Press the power button atop the iPhone and in precisely 16 seconds you’ll be at the home screen, where you can choose from 16 icons, each of which opens up a powerful widget.

1. iPhone SMS Text Messaging

The iPhone’s text widget is as seamless as you’d expect it to be. It lets you track conversations with any given person, separating her words and yours by silver and green speech bubbles.

So instead of clicking into and out of your text inbox and outbox and trying to remember the sequence of your conversations, iPhone’s SMS app shows all the text messages between you and a particular person at once, on the same page. All you have to do is flick through it.

iPhone’s SMS tool makes it seem obvious that that’s how SMS text messaging should be.

So what about the on-screen keyboard? I’m with Walt Mossberg on this one. iPhone’s keyboard at first makes you feel like giving up. The keys are small and the spell correction doesn’t always guess the word you had in mind - though it’s pretty accurate nevertheless, and you can probably expect it to become smarter in time, reducing errors caused by mistaps.

As you touch the virtual keys, the letters become magnified. If you see when a key is magnified that you tapped the wrong one, you can slide your finger (without lifting it) over to the correct key and let go of it to select it.

As I use the keyboard more, I find myself making less mistakes. If Mossberg is correct, I’ll be typing away like a pro in 5 days.

One downside for me about iPhone’s keyboard in the SMS widget is that it cannot be used in landscape mode. This is the case for most of the widgets that use the on-screen keyboard, except for the Safari browser (see point #15).

Another bummer about iPhone’s SMS app is the lack of a copy/paste feature. If you enter text in the wrong field by accident, for example, you can’t move it over to another field. Your only option is to rewrite it.

At first, I had some trouble figuring out how to move the blinking cursor in between letters in order to correct typos.

For example, say you spell thanks ‘thnks’ by accident, how do you move the blinking cursor in between the ‘h’ and the ‘n’ to insert an ‘a’?

Then I realized that if you tap and hold the word you’d like to correct, a magnifying glass appears, letting you move to the desired letter within the word. Pretty cool.

A potential privacy issue with iPhone’s SMS text messaging feature: when you receive a text message, no matter what you’re doing on the iPhone, the name of the sender pops up on the screen, along with their message. To my knowledge, there’s no way to keep the content of incoming text messages tucked away.

This was a bad idea on Apple’s part. Imagine you’re showing off your iPhone to a group of people — if you’re an early adopter, it’s gonna happen a lot, I promise — or someone else is navigating with Google Maps while you drive, and you receive a text message about something you’d rather be kept private. It will show up on the display.

Some messages you just don’t want people seeing, which is why Apple needs to allow the option to keep text messages where they belong… in the text app.

2. iPhone Calendar

The iPhone calendar lets you organize your schedule by month and by day, to the hour. Just tap the day or hour you wish to work with and tweak preferences like titles, locations, start and end times and alert settings for each event.

Setting times of the day is easy and fun; just flick two slot machine-style wheels to your desired hour and minute.

You can also view a list of just your upcoming events, instead of a full calendar. The iPhone’s calendar functions as a Tasks or To-Do list.

3. iPhone Photos

Tapping the Photos icon takes you to your Photo Albums page, where you can view a Camera Roll (all saved pictures that you’ve snapped from your iPhone camera) and any other albums that you’ve synced through iTunes.

You can scroll through albums, thumbnails and individual photos. The iPhone is very responsive to screen flicks when in the Photos app. You can flick through hundreds of photos pretty quickly if you want to, without any problems.

The multi-touch zoom works well, but it’s best if you use the tips of your fingers. At times placing my fingers flat yielded little response. But I imagine this, too, is a matter of getting used to.

4. iPhone Camera

For dedicated photographers, the iPhone’s camera leaves much to be desired, but the average user will find the photo quality more than acceptable in well-lit situations.

One problem with the iPhone camera is its slight lag time, which several times throughout my iPhone testing and review resulted in blurry photos. Upon taking a photo, you hear a “snap” sound. If the person being photographed moves away too shortly after the “snap” sound, the picture may appear blurry (of course, the more ambient light, the less likely it is that this will happen).

Another disappointment for me about the iPhone camera is its lack of a zoom feature. Most basic camera phones have a zoom feature. Why doesn’t the iPhone? If you want to get a closeup of someone, the only way to do it is to move close up.

5. YouTube on iPhone

YouTube on iPhone is straightforward and simple. It’s basically a list of videos with thumbnails, beneath which there are icons to view featured videos, most viewed videos, bookmarks, video search and more.

One thing lacking is the ability to comment on YouTube videos with the iPhone.

A note about EDGE: streaming videos via AT&T’s EDGE network IS possible, and it’s now FAST, too. AT&T reportedly upgraded its EDGE network right before the iPhone release, and users have been reporting much faster download speeds.

I can confirm that. Loading a 5 and a half minute YouTube video takes just under 10 seconds, and it streams continuously. I’m so happy with the new speed of the EDGE network that I could care less about 3G!

iPhone does not have a video camera, so you can’t record videos straight from your phone and post them on YouTube like some people had hoped. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; imagine the flood of low-quality, low-resolution videos that would permeate YouTube if iPhone’s run-of-the-mill camera recorded video.

6. iPhone Stocks widget

The iPhone’s Stocks app is pretty basic. You can enter a stock symbol and view its progress on a graph in 1-day, 1-week, 1-month, 3-month, 6-month, 1-year or 2-year intervals.

There’s not much more to it. I like the usability of the Stocks app, because it doesn’t require more steps than are necessary, unlike the Phone app, in my opinion. Scroll down to point #13 to see what I mean.

In my opinion, the Stocks app wins the simplicity award, of all the apps I cover in my iPhone review.

7. Google Maps on iPhone

Google Maps on the iPhone works great. Search for any location in the world and find street-by-street directions. You can view maps in Satellite mode, which will literally show you the streets you’re driving on, and when and where to make turns.

Alternatively, you can choose to view a MapQuest-style numbered list of text directions.

As expected, the iPhone does not have GPS. It cannot detect where you are. It simply looks up maps and tells you how to get from place to place.

8. iPhone Weather

The iPhone’s Weather widget, which is powered by Yahoo!, is just what you’d expect. You can program different cities into your iPhone and flick through pages detailing the highs and lows of your favorite cities over a week’s time.

An image of a cloud lets you know the conditions on any given day (sunny, partly cloudy, thunderstorms, etc.). And you can program the widget to show either Fahrenheit or Celsius temperatures. Pretty simple and straightforward.

9, 10 & 11. iPhone Clock, Calculator and Notes

The iPhone’s World Clock displays the local times in cities of your choice. You can add and delete cities, and drag around their positionings.

The clock widget also features an alarm, a stopwatch and a timer that alerts you with your ringtone of choice.

I love the alarm clock’s ability to program and save different alarms, which you can configure to ring on whatever days of the week you want. The iPhone alarm clock also has a snooze feature.

The calculator on the iPhone is perfect. The number buttons and the display are well-sized, and Apple doesn’t add more buttons than it needs to, just your basic arithmetic functions.

iPhone’s Notes widget lets you write down thoughts and ideas, organized within the lines of a yellow notepad. Adding a new note is as simple as tapping the “+” sign and typing it into the keyboard.

New notes are labeled with the date and time when they are written. It’d be nice to have the option to change the date. That would make it more friendly toward To-Do lists, since you could organize your schedule for upcoming days.

Alternatively, you can use the iPhone Calendar app to do this, as I mentioned before. But that can be limiting since To-Do lists aren’t necessarily events suited to a calendar.

12. iPhone Settings

From the Settings page, you can adjust sounds and ringtones. Unfortunately, there’s no option to use songs you’ve purchased off iTunes as ringtones. Why not? I think if you pay for the song file, it should be yours to use as you please. Maybe Apple has a ringtones store in the works.

If you put the iPhone on silent mode, you can choose whether to keep vibrate mode on or off. While other iPhone reviewers have said iPhone’s vibrate feature is weak, I think it vibrates just the right amount to be felt in a pocket, but not so much that it can be heard by other people.

One thing I can’t figure out is how to set SMS text messages to vibrate only mode. I’ll be disappointed if this option doesn’t exist on the iPhone.

In Settings, you can also adjust your wallpaper, Wi-Fi on/off, phone, Safari and iPod settings and more. It’s just a matter of tapping the setting you’d like to adjust and changing it.

13. The Phone

The iPhone’s phone aspect is great for organizing your contacts (you can sync them from your Yahoo!Mail or Windows Address Book), but in my opinion, the phone requires one-too-many steps to dial a number.

To call one of your friends, you must 1) tap the Phone icon on the home screen, 2) tap the Contacts button at the bottom, 3) tap the name of the person you want to call and 4) tap the number you want to dial.

It’s useful to have individual contact pages for each person, because you can organize phone numbers, home addresses, e-mail addresses and website addresses. But what if I just want to make a call?

Apple should add a small button next to each contact name that allows you to automatically dial that person’s primary phone number. That would allow you the option to not view the rest of the person’s contact info, so you can just make a call. Afterall, the iPhone should be a phone first, and then a sweet media player and organizer.

The sound clarity of phone calls is average and probably depends on AT&T’s coverage in your area. The volume is adjustable via the buttons on the left of the iPhone.

14. iPhone Mail

The Mail application lets you easily send and receive e-mails, provided that you configure your mail client for POP3 access. If you don’t want to do that, you can simply access your e-mail via the Safari browser.

iPhone’s Mail application can be configured to access numerous mailboxes (from Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL, .Mac Mail and others). iPhone lists your inbox messages very elegantly, with unread messages displaying a blue dot next to them.

I sent an e-mail to my Gmail address from my laptop, and the message appeared in my iPhone inbox several seconds before it appeared on my laptop.

It is a big disappointment that PDF and Word documents cannot be viewed in landscape mode, since it’s difficult to read and maneuver through condensed text on the iPhone’s upright narrow screen. I couldn’t imagine getting through a full eBook on my iPhone.

15. iPhone’s Safari Browser

The iPhone’s Safari browser renders websites just as it would on an actual Mac OS X computer, except for its lack of Java and Flash support. Because of AT&T’s EDGE upgrade, I had no problem loading pages quickly when in my car.

Safari also loads websites smoothly over a Wi-Fi network, depending on the speed of the connection being transmitted.

The iPhone’s browser is rotatable, so you can view pages in landscape mode. I like that the on-screen keyboard in the browser can be used in landscape mode as well, since it makes the keys larger and more accessible.

The graphics in the Safari browser are clear and pristine, as you’ve seen them on the iPhone ads. iPhone’s Safari can also display Chinese fonts and those of other languages.

One feature I love is the ability to double-tap the web-address bar and “Share” a webpage with a friend via e-mail.

You can’t connect a Bluetooth mouse to use within iPhone’s Safari, probably because there is no cursor.

16. iPhone’s iPod

iPhone’s iPod really is the best iPod ever created. It’s easy to flick through albums, songs and videos. And Cover Flow feels like you’re actually sorting through real albums.

The iPod’s volume can be adjusted either with the hardware volume buttons or on the screen.

What I love most about the iPhone’s iPod is that if no headphones are plugged in, songs are played through the iPhone’s speaker, and they sound great! The iPhone speakers are loud and clear enough to set down on the table and listen to with a small group of friends.

I could see this feature becoming an annoyance in public places if the iPhone becomes popular. Inevitably, there will be some inconsiderate people who will find it appropriate to blast their music on buses and trains for everyone to hear.

The iPhone syncs seamlessly with iTunes, but I’ve got to wonder why Apple didn’t integrate a “mini iTunes” on the iPhone for downloading music and video directly from the phone.

In Line @ the Apple Store

Crowds lined up in front of the Apple Store in Miami’s The Falls shopping plaza.

The Miami Herald published a front-page article on the iPhone headlined: “The iPhone Effect.” Send me your newspaper’s iPhone stories.

If you found this iPhone review helpful, show your support for Apple iPhone Review by sending it to your friends and linking to it from your blog.

Apple Has No Right to Break Your Unlocked iPhone (See Proof)

Owners of unlocked iPhones are rightfully nervous after Apple said yesterday that it “has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs … will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed.”

Worse, if your unlocked iPhone breaks, Apple will not fix it under the warranty, which they say becomes void if you tamper with the iPhone software.

Panic over having your unlocked iPhone damaged by an Apple software update may or may not be justified. One user on an Apple Discussions thread thinks “Apple is going to make it sound a lot worse than it actually is since they are the ones who don’t want you to do it in the first place,” referring to the software unlock that lets you use your iPhone on cell phone networks other than AT&T.

I’m writing today to prove that Apple has no legal right to break your unlocked iPhone, according to U.S. Copyright law. There’s a lot of hard-to-understand technical jargon on the U.S. Copyright Office website, but bear with me and I’ll translate to English:

First, some quick background: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to tamper with gadget manufacturers’ protection mechanisms in order to get the devices to perform differently. The reasoning behind this is that it is considered a violation of the developer’s copyrights.

However, the DMCA law does not apply to the iPhone because of one exemption laid out on the U.S. Copyright Office’s Anticircumvention Rulemaking page:

5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.

So what does this mean? It means that you are legally allowed to unlock your iPhone. So if Apple were to damage your device, they would be in violation of the law. I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

If you’ve already unlocked your iPhone and you want to be extra cautious, you can try undoing the unlock by following the steps on TUAW’s iPhone relocking tutorial.

If you enjoyed this article, read more like it in iPhone Hacks.