Before I snagged a black 32GB iPhone 3GS (thanks, Craig, Keith, Mary — and Wifey!) I poured over articles posted on the Internet, including a great tweet from a HAINSWORTH.COM reader on tips for typing on the touch screen keyboard. What I did not find, however, were the warnings about some of iPhone’s most significant shortcomings. Here they are.

Buggy Push Email

This is why the iPhone won’t be a Blackberry Killer. The push email feature of Apple’s $100/year Mobile Me service doesn’t always work. I’ve had to delete and recreate my me.com account three times to accomodate for various bugs including in the settings. It’s switched itself from smtp.me.com to smtp.mac.com as the email server twice. And for some reason it’s stopped pushing email to the phone altogether.

You have only two options to delete email on an iPhone: swipe your finger across the message, or touch "Edit" and tap red checkmarks next to each message you wish to delete (Click to embiggen)

No “Mark All as Read” in Email

So you’ve got your iPhone working with your existing email account. Great! Except you now have 104 unread messages. Not so great. In every email application on every phone on the planet, including my trusty ol’ Sony Ericsson K790a, you could “mark all as read.” But not on iPhone. On an iPhone you have to manually read each message or go to your desktop and choose “Mark All as Read” (so long as your account is IMAP based, not POP3 as most are).

No mass-delete in Email

Just like #2, you can’t “Delete all” or “Delete all read” messages. Got lots o’ spam? Be prepared to do a lot of tapping.

“You’ve got Mail!” (but you don’t know it)

Sometimes I get the “ding!” notification or vibration when I have new mail, sometimes I don’t. More often than not, I don’t know that I’ve gotten a message until I look at the screen. The intermittent failure of a basic notification system is a huge flaw.

No “Today” screen

You can’t get a quick glance at your life without several taps. From Blackberry to Windows Mobile, your calendar, to do, and most recent email and text messages are all visible on the screen the moment you turn it on. I count 7 taps to accomplish the same result on an iPhone.

No built-in To Do list

Sure, you can get one from the App Store, but they don’t sync with my Outlook “Tasks” feature.

Mobile Me doesn’t sync Outlook “Notes”

You can only sync your notes when you dock your iPhone at your computer and fire up iTunes.

iPhone Voice Control: great in theory, a disaster in practice

Voice Control doesn’t work

I’m a professional broadcaster. Diction is my stock and trade. But my request to “play Solsbury Hill” got me “Playing songs by Thievery Corporation.” “Next track” works. So does “What’s playing?” but forget requesting specific tracks or artists. I haven’t dared ask iPhone to find me songs by “Chantel Kreviazuk” out of fear I’ll break its brain. Why hasn’t voice recognition improved since I started playing with it 16 years ago on my Macintosh Centris 610? And what about text to speech? The voices still sound like they did on my Amiga 500 — 22 years ago.