I think the OP and others have very good points. The phone is not a strength and has had few if any changes in its funtionality. It is a VERY basic phone with less ordinary features than most flip phones.
Perhaps you were using different flip phones than I used to, or perhaps you have forgotten how flip phones operated, but my iPhone's phone functions are far superior to any flip phone I've used.
1-It takes me 4 or 5 clicks to start dialing ( on-unlock-HOME-phone-dial).
Really? It takes me one. (Home/headset button. "Call <number or contact>.")
2-A new incoming call and there is no easy way to save the number in contacts. It can be done with work arounds.
For as long as I can remember, tapping the arrow to the right of any new number in my call history yields this:
This isn't a workaround. This is built-in part of the OS and has been quite easy, at least for me.
3-The antenna is now better. To be fair for the first 3 iPhones I had tons of dropped calls. I stopped using it at home. Six months ago I switched carriers for the iP4s and have had zero dropped calls since. It may not always be the antenna.
This has been a YMMV matter, and continues to be to this day. I've owned plenty of phones that don't work well in poor coverage areas, and the iPhone has been no exception to this.
That said, its performance HAS steadily improved with each new model.
4-There is no way I have found to just dial 4 numbers and the phone enters the preceding six. I used this often before the iPhone. I, one time, programed the six digits and the phone (Treo) when I was paged overhead to 4 digit extention and not near a company phone, would dial the area code, the exchange and then the 4 digits.
5- I have found no way to enter a pause when dialing live. I can program a contact with a pause, but not live.
I'll give you these, but even you have to admit that these two gripes are fairly niche. While my contacts at work are on a company VoIP system where internally we can dial a 5 digit extension and reach who we want, I think we've always accepted that external phones (including cell phones) dialing in will have to do so using the full +1 XXX XXX XXXX dialing scheme.
Not to mention, I rarely
dial either my work phone nor my iPhone anymore... more often than not I select who I want to call off a list of contacts. It's been a
really long time since I've had to actually remember a sequence of numbers to reach an individual beyond the time it takes to enter it into a contact.
I love my iPhone but I, like others, would enjoy some attention to the phone characteristics.
i certainly don't want Apple to
stop work on the phone app, it's hard to argue they haven't done anything with it at all.
internal antenna phones are crappy cell phones.
Yeahhhh... So that you know, the iPhone 4 and 4S are technically
not "internal antenna phones," considering that the very-external metal band running along the sides is the antenna.
Apple is a computer company first and foremost.
They
used to be. They've changed considerably since then.
Take for example blackberry and nokia they are cell phone companies first.
Oh, you mean the companies that make "internal antenna phones" exclusively now?
Apple put a phone into a computer and innovated things, while nokia and blackberry had to put a computer into a phone to compete.
Yet somehow, Apple is still selling far more phones than either of them.
