Most annoying iphone features

The iphone is a pretty good phone. Still, it does some stuff that drives me crazy. Most of these follow a simple theme. Iphone does something amazing. Iphone makes a simple error that makes amazing feature useless. Because of that I never use this feature.

So here is a short list of the most annoying things the iphone does:

1. The spell checker automatically changes words. A spell checker is a wonderful thing. However often you actually want to say something that is not in the dictionary. Or worse, you misspelled something in a way that is similar to another word. The iphone helpfully changes all of these words into something completely different without ever asking my permission. I found that time after time I would send a message that made no sense at all because my phone changed a word which was one or two letters away from the correct one into one entirely different. If the iphone ever lets me turn on the spell checker without auto-correct I would love to use it. Until then, I will have to work with my own spelling abilities.

2. I cannot make websites think I am on a normal computer. This might seem a small issue, it isn't. Many pages helpfully redirect your attempts to get to their real site to a mobile site which has less than half the information of the real site, but has large buttons. The best example of this I can think of happened when I was looking for a place to rent. I found a whole bunch of places to look at on a local newspaper website. I emailed them to myself and went out to look at places figuring I could look up details on my iphone later. Only instead of giving me access to the actual webpage, this newspaper transferred me to a mobile site. This site had none of the information I actually wanted! I had to drive to a real computer to do something that my iphone was quite capable of doing, but was simply refusing to do. Sometimes I have been able to make google cache give me pages that are hidden from my iphone, but more often I just cannot get to the real page. A great example of a page that limits users is forbes.com. A few months back they created a mobile site. Now, without going through some heroics there is no way to see the actual site. Sure, the articles are on the mobile site, but what if you went to the site to read user comments? I see no way at all to access these from an iphone. Rarely if ever does a mobile site include all of the information of the real site.

3. I can't turn off the anti-red eye feature on the camera flash. The camera flash is too bright. In a dark room the LED makes anyone looking towards the camera squint or rapidly look away. If it only had a quick flash this would be a small issue. I would take the picture in the short time of the flash so they wouldn't have time to cower in pain. Sure they would have red eyes, but I could remove that later with software. Instead the LED turns on for a long time, everyone cringes and looks away, then the short flash happens. So I have a flash that is mostly useful for taking pictures of objects. If I am taking pictures of people they better be looking away from the camera or be in a bright room.

4. No dvorak keyboard. This would be easy for them to add as a feature. I doubt it would take a programmer long to install the feature. To my knowledge there is no way to do this though.