The Achilles’ Heel of iPhone Data (And Why It Makes The SDK Lose Value)

by Daniel Hollister • 03/02/2008 at 04:38 PM

The other night, I was sitting in a lovely coffee shop in Westwood, waiting for my friends to either show up and meet me, or for them to call and let me know when they would be doing so. Since I had several minutes to burn either way, I pulled out my trusty iPhone and started to browse Facebook for some time. A few minutes after I finished doing this, I noticed that suddenly I had two voicemails from friends who were rather confused as to why I didn’t pick up. (I almost always pick up my phone.)

I had five bars of service in a major part of Los Angeles. What gives?

Suddenly it hit me. While it has been long known that you cannot use EDGE while receiving phone calls, the iPhone is not smart enough to give priority to the voice connection. Or, at the very least, it cannot do so consistently.

That’s right—my menial browsing of Facebook was enough to stop the mighty iPhone from receiving phone calls.

After some testing in this matter, it would appear that while the results vary, the majority of the time you are on EDGE, the phone will not ring. Period.

Old news for some? Probably. After all, I did know this was an EDGE limitation, but my old phones (a Motorola SLVR and a Sony Z310a) were both smart enough to pause the EDGE connection whenever the phone rang and allow me to answer the call. The fact that the iPhone does not do this is… well, disturbing.

While all of us are sitting here salivating over the imminent SDK, it occurred to me that most of the applications I would really want or expect are data-intensive apps. In this situation, one can therefore assume that if using anything like an AIM app over EDGE could hinder your ability to pick up calls when you need to.

Is that worth it? Is your shiny RSS feed app or Jabber client worth your inability to receive calls? I would have to say no. For many of us, our phones are our lifelines to friends, family, and work. In my situation, I must be reachable via cellphone virtually any time, and a missed call that I don’t notice for fifteen minutes or longer can be a serious problem for me.

And I know there’s others out there that are similar. Most smartphone users are people who have a schedule to keep or a project to run, and communication is key.

The argument, of course, is that you can use these apps just fine over wifi. But how often are most iPhone owners really in hot spots? Most wifi areas besides my house that I go do require me to log in, and I seldom log out—meaning that if I am using an AIM client and then walk out of the coffee shop, either the AIM client needs to be smart and log me off on its own when it determines I am on EDGE, or I have to think about it, and manually log off every time I leave.

Forcing people to think about what they’re doing is never good for an Apple product.

This is a limitation that will be eliminated with a 3G iPhone, but for the rest of us, what will we do? Is the iPhone’s inability to give priority calls something in the chipset or something that can be provided to us with a software update?

Will it be worth it to produce or use applications that are as data-intensive as the ones we’ve been hoping for?

While it is a great thing that the iPhone is revolutionizing internet access on-the-go, sacrificing the phone aspect of your iPhone is far too high a price.