iPhone Annoyances
It’s now been about a month and a half since I first got my iPhone, and I can finally say I’ve found a couple of things that irritate me:
- Photos emailed from the iPhone itself are automatically resized, presumably so it’s faster to send and so that the recipient doesn’t get a gigantic photo in their inbox. That’s fine, but sometimes I want to email a photo to myself or to Flickr when I’m not home to sync with iPhoto. In this situation I don’t want to work with a smaller image, but there’s no way that I can find to email the full version. So it would be nice if you could choose a size to use when emailing, as you can in iPhoto.
- I don’t like the fact that mail I send from my Gmail account shows up in my iPhone inbox. This one’s not a big deal, because it’s easy enough to hide or delete it, but it seems like silly behavior anyway.
- It seems to take kind of a long time for MobileMail to render HTML email, even after it’s fully downloaded. Again, it’s just a second or two here and there but it adds up.
- I wish there were a way to sync Notes with my iMac somehow. Although you can send a note as an email, which isn’t so bad and is what I’ve been doing so far. But real syncing would be nice. Maybe in Leopard.
You may notice that copy and paste are missing from my list, and that’s for two reasons. The first is that everyone else has already complained about the lack of these functions, so I don’t feel I really need to talk about it. The second is that I haven’t actually felt the need to copy or paste anything more than once or twice so far. I suspect this is something that varies wildly from person to person, and in my case there’s just not much that I do on the phone that needs copy or paste. But I won’t argue that it would be nice to have.
All of these are pretty nitpicky complaints, and in general I’m still very happy with my iPhone. None of these things would have kept me from buying the phone if I had known about them in advance.
Point 2.
It’s gmail that automatically creates and email in your inbox when you use an external client to send emails from your gmail account. Pretty random, but my phone (bog standard nokia with email access) does the same thing
Regarding #2: if I am reading correctly, the problem may be that your Gmail account is set to automatically CC or BCC yourself on new messages.
For messages sent from iPhone, this can be disabled on the iPhone in Settings –> Mail by turning the “Always BCC Myself” switch to OFF. You may also need to address this in Gmail itself, I think via something in Settings –> Forwarding and POP. There is also a setting in Apple Mail (Preferences –> Composing), if you use that.
Hope this helps.
Dan: Ah, thanks for pointing that out.
Christopher: Both of those settings are already off, actually. It seems to be just email I send from my Gmail account but not from the iPhone. (The ones sent from the iPhone itself are correctly placed in the Sent folder.)
The real problem with Gmail and POP (and by extension the iPhone) is that since the iPhone doesn’t really have folders, you’re not actually downloading from the inbox — you’re downloading from “All Mail”, which includes your own messages. Gmail is smart enough (apparently) not to send you something twice if you’re retrieving mail from the same client that sent a given message. But if you send a message from the web interface, it will be downloaded by your desktop client, the iPhone, or both.
On the desktop I deal with this by setting up a rule that automatically moves any new message where I’m listed as the sender but not a recipient into the appropriate Sent folder. Obviously, this approach does not work on the iPhone, and there is nothing you can do on Gmail’s side (short of deleting your own sent messages entirely) to prevent them from being downloaded by one client or another.
I love Gmail, but I’m seriously considering just not using it with my iPhone until either the iPhone gets filters or Gmail gets a more sophisticated POP or IMAP feature.
I have a feeling that the notes-syncing is coming with Leopard.
can you up load pictures via flickr’s website? my nokia has that lifeblog ap with flickr upload.