Decaflon

I wanted to wait a few days before posting just to get some more hands-on time with the iPhone. I'm currently up in NY taking care of some wedding business and the iPhone has been my primary email gadget so I could really put it through its paces.

Coming from my Blackberry 8700c, I'm used to industrial strength mobile email. The Blackberry UI is obviously a lot different than the iPhone's mail UI, so the experience is a polar opposite, but not in a completely black/white good/bad way. The Blackberry email application has rudimentary message listing capabilities (quick and dirty scanning, no real HTML email) however it's extremely fast. Using the sidescroller to fly up and down my email inbox was great for one-handed checking, and email messages loaded instantly. Now, the iPhone mail application was modeled after the real Mail application on a desktop computer, so I think Apple engineers forgot about the whole "mobile" and "speed" aspects and put form way ahead of function.

The problems with iPhone mail stem from two main sources: the touch-screen interface needing certain UI elements in place to move back and forth within the application, and the Apple engineers trying to make MobileMail more like normal Apple Mail. My largest problem with iPhone Mail is that there is no way to merge multiple email accounts into one folder for quick viewing of all emails you've received. I have three email accounts setup through my iPhone, and the process to check them is this:

1. Touch Mail icon (brings me to Accounts screen)
2. Touch Account 1 (brings me to that particular account)
3. Touch Inbox (brings me to that account's inbox list)
4. Touch account name button (brings me back to that particular account)
5. Touch accounts button (brings me back to main Accounts screen)
6. Touch Account 2 (brings me to that particular account)
7. Touch Inbox (brings me to that account's inbox list)
8. Touch account name button (brings me back to that particular account)
9. Touch accounts button (brings me back to main Accounts screen)
10. Touch Account 3 (brings me to that particular account)
11. Touch Inbox (brings me to that account's inbox list)
12. Touch account name button (brings me back to that particular account)
13. Touch accounts button (brings me back to main Accounts screen)

13 different buttons to touch in order to check my three inboxes, not counting the up and down flicking to scan through the inbox, nor the actual reading of any messages.

On my Blackberry, these 13 steps were collapsed into 1. Scroll to the Messages icon (on a BB you have a Mail account icon for each account you've setup, but you also have a combined "Messages" application that brings them all together), and click. No clicking back and forth, no messing around. The worst part about Apple Mail's process of checking your email is that the button that goes back to the previous screen is located on the top left of the device, so using my right thumb (attached to my right hand, the only one holding the device normally) to hit that top left corner isn't very convenient and I have to stretch it out to successfully hit the button. So on top of the 13 steps needed to access all my inboxes, the process is slowed further because I can't just quickly hit a back button but need to concentrate so I don't miss it. Not infuriating, but definitely a gigantic annoyance.

One of Apple's most touted features on its Mail application is the concept of full HTML email. Let me tell you a little something, full HTML email on a mobile device is worthless. I don't care about the design or the fonts or the colors, I just want to read the email as quickly as possible with as little fuss as possible. I don't know what the problem is, but about 50% of the time when accessing a particular message, the loading icon spins for about 1-2 seconds before showing me the message. Sometimes it's 3-4 seconds if I'm loading a medium-sized response thread, and if there are more than 5-6 emails in a threaded response, you're way past 5 seconds for the load. Nothing is more frustrating than waiting 5 seconds for a damn email message to pop up, especially on a tiny mobile device. Oh, and on my old Blackberry, it was instant for every email regardless of length. One of BB's tricks was they only loaded in part of the message if it was deemed of a particular size, and once you got down to the bottom of that section and tried to scroll onwards down the message, it'd pause for a second or two to load the rest of it, then go on its merry way. I much prefer that method, especially since I only care about the top response on a large thread, making the wait times for the full message completely worthless and unnecessary.

My second largest gripe with iPhone Mail is the lack of search. When you have hundreds of messages spread across multiple inboxes, and only a tiny mobile device to scroll through them all, search is an absolute necessity. The people at RIM got this right and the Blackberry email search was fantastic and allowed you to search separate fields, multiple fields, etc. Search inside of email is the killer feature for all Mail applications IMO, and on my Mac at home I have every email I've ever received across multiple accounts, now spanning back over 3 years, so search is important. This needs to be fixed for anyone to use the iPhone as a serious mobile replacement for email.

Oh, and there's no way to respond to parts of an email, only the whole thing. No way to select text, copy, nor paste. No way to add multiple photos to one email message. No way to hit "Email Photo" and choose what email account you want to send from, it automatically uses your default account. No way to select more than one message at once to mark as read or delete. My Mail icon will perpetually say I have a few hundred new messages for the rest of my life unless I feel like spending 20 minutes individually reading or deleting each message.

So are there any good things about iPhone Mail? Sure, it can find recently used email addresses very quickly which is useful, and um, that's about it. iPhone Mail is nearly worthless if you have more than 1 account or receive more than a half-dozen email messsages per day. Mail on the iPhone is the black eye on the entire device, and Apple needs to really address these issues pronto.