Venu Anuganti Blog

My iPhone had few issues lately like:

• getting hot when its charging with the USB connected to PC or when playing video songs or movies
• randomly the touch screen gets hung (especially when the phone is in lock state and when you receive a call and to answer when I slide the bar) and only hard reset is needed in order to get around this.
• the safari browser crashes for few sites and luckily nothing happens to iPhone but instead it goes to home screen automatically from browser window (good and bad: good in the sense the crash is limited to application and bad in the sense the Safari is crashing)

Up on contacting Apple customer service (1-800-My-iPhone) they decided to take my iPhone for testing as they thought heat is not permitted. Immediately next day morning I got the Apple Service 8GB iPhone as a lender phone and I shipped my iPhone back to Apple on the same day using the same shipping box. After 3 days I got my original phone back and nothing that Apple was able to fix nor they provided any kind of diagnose information to me to know what kind of tests they performed. Only thing that was mentioned in the letter was:


The reported symptom(s) that is not reproducible:
789/Unusually Warm Service


And after I got my phone, I kept it for re syncing and for charging. After few hours I noticed that the phone is hot…..not sure what to do at this time. I am still wondering why they did not perform any manual testing on this kind of issues or contacted me back on how to reproduce the issue.

As apple announced the price reduction in the iPhone series nearly 200$, and am sure it is because they wanted to increase the total sales. Anyway, as I brought the iPhone just a week back I felt like I could have waited for a week or so to get the new price. Upon calling the customer service, they credited back the difference amount, thats a cool deal. Actually I asked them if I can get the upgrade from 4GB to 8GB instead of the credit, but they said it has to go through regular credit and they can’t issue any apple store credit.

At least am happy that I got my money back with the new price reduction. Now, lets wait and see how the iPhone sales will pitch.

Finally I also own an iPhone now. I ordered this on Aug 22nd and has the phone in my hand by 24th morning 10AM with the default free shipping. Good and fast shipping service from Apple. I used to think Dell used to ship the products asap if they are in stock, and looks like apple is also doing in the same way.

I enabled it using iTunes with another 2-year contract with Cingular with extra 20$ for the unlimited data plan. The phone is real surprise to me in terms of features…very good design and break through technology and most importantly its user friendly.

I thought the following could have been a nice to have features in iPhone as I felt lacking of them is becoming hard to keep the iPhone as the replacement to the other phones (I used to have Cingular PDA 8125 and Blackberry 8700C):

Features that I really liked in iPhone: 

• Light weight and cool UI interface
• Easy navigation to most of the features like stocks, weather, maps
• Safari browser with zoom in and out using two fingers
• Screen scrolling using fingers
• Phone and iTunes together
• Video clarity is too good (especially when playing ipod videos or you-tube)
• builtin Camera photo resolution and its clarity
• Yahoo! mail interface without the need of pop interface

Features that are needed in iPhone for common use:

• Copy and Paste functionality 
• Built in AIM for Yahoo, AOL and MSN
• Improve in the sound quality of the incoming voice, its very hard at times to hear other party and looks like other do not have any problem in hearing
• The home button is not that sensitive in the unit that I got, some times I needed hard press.
•  I noticed the safari browser often crashes and it immediately goes to home screen and you lost what you visiting. Could have been nice if they had a nice auto recovery of the last visited links
• After I place a call, I never able to go back and end the call, automatically the screen is locked by that time.
• Lack of flash support in the Safari is really a pain as we can not use all websites
• Easy way to configuration to support the keyboard with both numbers and letters in one-dial pad.
• Call Log history should have been with some more basic features like distinguishing incoming and outgoing calls along with the total time spent on each call
• Separate TODO list or gadget
• Safari setting to have the default home page (good that they provided a way to toggle between the Google and Yahoo search engine)
• Speaker volume is pretty much limited, it should have been bit more louder
• Maps feature should had a way to change from default Google to Yahoo and/or Map quest as Google maps often gives wrong routes.
• Lack of remote connectivity tools like a shell or terminal, ssh, putty, VNC viewer and a remote RDP client
• Maps is not  fully features (at least should had a way to re-route or finding a alternative way)
• Way to integrate web-based exchange e-mails
• Bulitin RSS reader could have been a great addition
• Could have been nice if ipod had its own Album section instead of going to more and then selecting the albums.

Overall its really a cool toy to play and it mostly suites for day to day software engineers life.