I travel on the train often so my handsets regularly drop their network connections. It’s no biggie. This has been happening since 1986 and it’s factored in to the occasionally frustrating mobile experience.
What’s utterly perplexing, though, is the iPhone’s panicked “Cannot access data network” prompt whenever the network drops.
It doesn’t matter what I’m doing on the phone — even if I’m not actively using it — I seem to get this crazy message.
It’s crazy because it’s a super example of totally sh1t user experience. Apple are supposed to be the masters of this stuff.
But the moment your handset hits a “no service” pocket, you’re warned with a prompt that requires you to dismiss it before you can continue.
This is a good example of how dated iOS is, from a fundamental level. Back in 2006, when the team were programming it for a 2007 release, this might have sounded like a useful feature, especially if your first-gen hardware was a bit iffy on the connection quality.
I do have to point out that not even the horrific Nokia N97 displayed silly prompts like this. The handset just got on with it.
Getting on with it is, coincidentally, what many of iPhone’s fans like so much. The appreciate that they don’t have to switch on or manually activate a WiFi connection. Nor do they need to tell the phone which to prioritise. When you get home, your iPhone will pick up your WiFi seamlessly — a huge improvement on the manual systems that had gone before.
All the whizzy experiential joy goes out of the window when you’re forced to routinely interrupt your handset usage to acknowledge it’s panicky network issue. Why is this even built into the operating system any more?
Just deal with it, iPhone!
