ok.. so since every one here is speaking in a umbiased way for the most part, can we get back to naming factual things that the iphone can not do. strictly for research purposes. not for troll baiting or anything like that.

Was 2.0 out about 6 months ago? Because I've had the SMS thing for a while

i didn't know about these two issues. why's that? what does st. jobs want to protect his followers from?

and THAT is why I don't want an iphone. That and all the other hype. Diversity will keep us strong.

It could have been there and I overlooked it.

The Apple iPhone cannot do true multi-tasking. What they've implemented into iOS 4 is basically still serial-tasking and switches between apps that keep a state, but do not continue. This might change later to quasi-multi-tasking allowing apps like Pandora to run in the background and continue to play music and such.

The iPhone (out of the box) cannot edit *.doc, *.xls files, but can read them.

You cannot tether without invoking charges.

You do not have root access without jailbreaking.

There is no Adobe Flash and despite being many other webkit variants - and Opera Mini - on the iPhone, the browser choices are all limited to whatever Apple will allow.

You cannot truly mount the phone as a hard drive without 3rd party software.

Transferring files via bluetooth is only an option via jailbreak.

Transferring files via HTTP/WiFi is only an option via app purchase. And those files are not part of the normal storage... for instance if you wish to play a transferred file into the iPod portion of the phone, won't happen. You will have to invoke iTunes on your desktop to sync that file.

You have to use iTunes to activate the phone (annoying to me).

You cannot update over the air the OS.

Unless you have the $99 a year developer's account, you cannot deploy or test your own apps.

You cannot visit Flash only sites.

Until iOS 4, if you hit an HTML5 video, it would invoke a Quicktime based app - YouTube or something another. That's changed, but still not 100% implemented in iOS 4 - I just installed the "gold master" build last night and still testing.

Folders are limited to 12 apps, no scrolling.

Their app approval process is finicky. I have GV Mobile (paid), yet they pulled it. It's now on Cydia though (jailbreak). I have Tris, but they pulled that too. There are many others.

There are plenty of other things, but I'm quite sure most of those are known or over-exaggerated. The whole "no Flash" part does affect me directly. The MS Exchange does work well... but it forces you to lock your phone (which, I already do, but that's a major complaint for people). The VPN software is lacking, but functional.

Sharing mp3s is technically illegal.
As for downloading a file from a webpage, the iPhone wasn't really built like that. Accessing the file system without jailbreaking it is impossible.

To be honest, the iPhone isn't for advanced users. If I got an iPhone, I would still carry my n900 around. For the things it is meant to do, the iPhone does it very well.

The iPhone wasn't built with geeks in mind. It was built for people who just want to a phone that can entertain them on the side. The n900 was built to be a workhorse. While the n900 can do a lot of the things the iPhone does and even more, the iPhone is better at most things they have in common.

Look at web browsing for instance, on the n900 you get the full web at a cost: browser speed. On the iPhone, pages load faster because it isn't the full web. It is trade off. Apple won't add flash if it makes their device slow. Apple won't add flash when they know their browser can't handle it as well as a competitor's browser. I've noticed that apple only adds things when it can be better than re competitor. Look at the front acing camera. From what I saw at wwdc, the images were clearer than ours. Facetime is wifi only because apple knows putting it over 3g would expose a shortcoming. Now skype even wants to make use of facetime

don't you know benny, users downloading files from the internet is dangerous

anyway, there is no common file storage on the iphone platform(even with jailbreaking it is kind of a hack) which means if you have one app that creates files or whatever they are not accessible to other apps. Of course some of the apple developed apps can access *some* files across apps, but I don't think this is open to all apps.

In other words, on an iphone, you can't open file manager, create a folder called client2, go to the internet and find the pdf and the ppt and images you need and download them and save them in that folder. Nor can you AFAIK download to your iphone various files to have with you and email them out as needed. there are various webdav and dropbox hacks to get around these limitations though.

a huge limitation IMO.

I think iWork is coming to the iPhone. There was a screenshot I saw that hinted it. An attachment had an option to open in Keynote

i guess the people who dont have a friendly humor out here, telling each other to stop this or that !! go cry in a corner !!

peace out enjoy

They're using Grand Central to do it. The main thread is stopped when pushed into the background but not freed, however that main thread can pass a fairly constrained subthread off to the Grand Central daemon which lets things like Pandora continue to stream in the background.

It's actually quite interesting, and the architecture is mostly open source (but requires Objective-C's runtime and syntax changes, and the license isn't quite compatible with the GPL.)

Oh wait, was that the wrong kind of comment for this thread?