Idyllic retreat, or boredom incarnate? Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.

You would easily be forgiven for thinking the iPhone was a paragon of technical perfection, the answer to all of our prayers and so forth. Certainly I would warrant that a quick Internet trawl would throw up many articles praising the iPhone as Steve Jobs’ Second Coming, and more or less establishing it as the de-facto web 2.0 geek’s mobile phone of choice. But in amongst such positivity, how do we find the negative? You guessed it, that’s one of the problems I’m trying to solve.

Sometimes it’s as easy as adding the word ’sucks’ to your Googling. And yet an article like this MobileCrunch rundown of ‘8 things that we still can’t stand about the iPhone‘ is full of negative language without using too many explicitly laden adjectives, while also being very specific, constructive and useful. The comments thread is a goldmine for anyone looking to make a better iPhone, so it’s not just Apple that should be paying attention, but its competitors too.

My point here is that although things seem black-and-white when you’re trying to pull out the negativity surrounding a product, often really valuable content can be hard to find manually, whereas a sophisticated natural-language algorithm that weighted several factors would identify the above article as being fairly key to the negative sentiment around the iPhone yesterday and today. Such as, I don’t know, the one I’m developing.

As a side note, most of the poster’s concerns about the iPhone are pretty valid, and as commenters immediately identify, lack of copy and paste is a big problem too. To be frank, though, only two of the problems really affect me – no SMS counter, and no email search. Due to being Twitter-trained, 160 character messages are a luxury, and Gmail offers a web interface for when I need to search — sometimes we train ourselves to work around the device’s faults, rather than expecting the device to work for us.