I love my iPhone 4 and have been a customer since the original iPhone. I truly believe it was rushed to market before many kinks were worked out. We all hear about some of the big ones (which frankly don’t affect me), but there are other major usability issues that need to be addressed.

My biggest gripe about the iPhone 4 is the ambient light sensor – it doesn’t adjust until after the screen is unlocked. So when I am outside in bright daylight, I cannot look at the screen to see who is calling until I swipe my finger; I can’t even check the time without swiping. This is a huge issue and I am surprised no one really complains about it.

Next, the screen is too sensitive; I have to consciously turn off the device before placing it in my pocket or who knows what will happen.

And yes, the software driving the proximity sensor needs adjustment; I hate it when my conversation changes to my headset while holding it to my face (or a number of other problems).

Finally, I have been noticing that it is more sensitive to bumps in the road while listening to music. If I go over a rough section of road, the iPod app will switch to another song. Good grief!

I believe these are all fixable through software; I hope the next version of iOS4 addresses these issues.

My computer was failing frequently so I had it serviced through AppleCare (actually the “Depot” for much less than Apple) and they replaced the logic board. Turns out that iTunes authorizations are tied to the logic board. Without the old motherboard, it is impossible to de-authorize the account for the computer and thus an additional device (the computer with the new logic board) must be authorized (of the five allowed). Of course, I already had five devices authorized so I had to de-authorize all and re-authorize my active devices.

Moral of the story is if you send your mac in for a logic board replacement, make sure to de-authorize the computer prior to service; this will allow you to authorize the computer upon receipt and not consume one of the five authorizations for the phantom computer.

Unfortunately, I am tiring of my iPhone; mostly due to the slow network speed. Now that the iTouch has all the cool apps as the iPhone (Goole Maps being the most useful for me) I’d like to give up the phone capabilities but still want to make phone calls through Google Maps. It would be great to have an iTouch application (or any platform in general) that could place a call through a bluetooth-connected cell phone. This would give me most of the same functionality of the iPhone without the headaches of the AT&T network.

I purchased and activated my iPhone without incident Friday (unlike a lot of others) but have not been very successful at getting some items to work the way I would prefer. One example is access to email. I’m hesitant to open the secure IMAP port (IMAPS, tcp port 993) and would never open IMAP (tcp port 143); I would prefer to connect at a port greater than 1024 but can’t seem to find any settings on my iPhone that permit this configuration. So, I obliged the iPhone and opened port 993 and could not get it to work. Looking at my application event log revealed the culprit: a bunch of errors for Source IMAP4SVC, Event ID 1051 – Unexpected error condition: call to function CEncryptCtx::CheckServerCert() resulted in error code 0x800cc801.

Turns out this is an easy fix; I didn’t have the certificate installed on my Exchange server (as I never configured IMAP or IMAPS for use). Right-clicking on the IMAP4 Virtual Server, clicking on the Certificate button on the Access tab and installing a Web Server certificate fixed the issue right away. Now I get to enjoy more functionality on the iPhone.