Blogging from iPhone
July 14th, 2007 by ktula
I am on Orcas Island now, just finished attending a lovely wedding. Since there is no free WIFI network that i can find, i have decided to see how blogging is using my iPhone on AT&T’s EDGE network.
Immediately, i noticed that there is one thing that i cannot do: i cannot upload the pictures i took during the ferry ride to Orcas Island. The “Choose file” button is greyed out. Even if the “Choose file” button is not greyed out, it may not be possible to transfer pictures from the iPhone because the operating system shell is hidden.
Except for a 5-minute stretch which there was no signal during which i attempted to send a few SMS or text messages (more on this later), i was able to surf the web and make two voice calls without any issue.
When i got back to the hotel, i tried to resend the SMS that had failed to deliver during the few minutes on the ferry when there was no signal. Because Apple implemented SMS on the iPhone like iChat, the message that failed to go out earlier was erased when i went to the main SMS menu. There is simply no way to retrieve that message. In all the Sony Ericsson phones that i have owned, any text message that is not delivered goes to the Draft folder, any message that is sent goes to the Sent folder. If i ever want to resend the same message to a different person, all i have to do is to go to the Sent folder, select the message and then select the person/s to send to. All these are not possible in the iPhone.
Also, while iPhone is trying to send a message, there does not appear to be a way to compose or read another message. Normally, this will not a problem. However when iPhone is trying to send a message but is not able to, it will stay around the 90% mark on the progress bar. So until it errors out, you can’t do anything within the SMS menu other than cancelling out message that is being sent. Naturally, cancelling the message means that I will have to retype the whole again.
Back to the issue in which I could not send any text messages. Since my messages did not go through, i tried to call instead. None of the calls went through. I know this has to be a bug because i was able to surf the web and Janet was able to make severals calls using her SE W810i on the same AT&T network. While i was having problems sending SMS and making calls, the reception indicator was showing full signal strength. To fix my problems, I tried powering the phone off by pressing and holding the power button for a few seconds. The screen blanked out with a spinning indicator that won’t go away, meaning, I had to press and hold both th power and the home buttons to reboot the phone.
Blogging this entry took more than an hour. I find that when I am using iPhone in the landscape mode and writing to a text box, the virtual keypad takes up more than 2/3 of the screen real estate, making scrolling up and down extremely difficult. This is especially so when I was attempting to go back and correct some typos. Since iPhone’s virtual keypad does not include any direction buttons, scrolling through a block of text is only possible by putting your finger on where you want the cursor to move to and then hold for about half a second until the magnifying glass shows up. The magnifying glass has some limitations or design issues.
First, it only magnifies to what appears to be fixed percentage. If the text that I am trying to magnify is tiny to begin with, it won’t enlarge the font to what I consider a legible size.
Second, if you try to use the magnifying glass too close to the upper edge of the screen, you won’t be able to see what’s in the magnifying glass because a significant portion of the magnifying glass is hidden beyond the screen. To get around the second issue, I have to scroll the page down so that the area where I want to move the cursor to os no longer near the top display edge. But then if I am already in the landscape mode, I can’t easily acroll the page vertically! All these made blogging this entry rather tedious and time consuming.
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