The iPhone has a quirk that is starting to become a hindrance. Every time the phone goes through a patch of dead air where there’s no cell signal, it pops up a dialogue box saying “network lost”. This obviously could be useful at times, but it’s bad for two reasons:

1. Firstly, we, the collective public of mobile phone users, have coped without such a pop-up on all previous mobile phones, we’re happy with a little icon telling us how much signal we have, so it’s cute, but redundant.
2. Secondly the iPhone is a computer – its so much more than a phone, so a pop up message indicating network loss interrupts other applications and thus gets in the way.

A good example is in the car when using InstaMapper‘s GPS Tracker.   Once interrupted, the tracker is no longer the foreground application, so it can no longer stop the phone from sleeping: consequently the screen goes off, and position and speed can’t be read without turning the screen back on and unlocking the phone – not something to be doing whilst driving.

There has to be some way of disabling this that I’m missing; or it needs to be an option in the next OS release!