Somewhat Silent Mode

So one of my biggest pet peeves with the iPhone is that the silent switch doesn’t truly silence the phone. If the iPhone is set to silent mode, phone rings and all alert sounds are silenced, but the iPod is NOT. Give it a shot, flip the silent switch and go to iPod and play something, it’ll output through the external speakers.

This is clearly intentional and also clearly wrong. The only reason anyone would ever want to silence the phone is to be polite. You are in an office, a movie theater a dinner party and you don’t want to disturb anyone with your noisy phone. Thus the phone should be prohibited from making noise. Period. I’ve accidentally activated the iPod app and played music or a video when I didn’t mean to countless embarrassing times. At first because I would be fooling around with the iPhone and expected silent mode to be, you know, silent. Subsequently it’s happened several times when the headphones are slightly loose in the socket. It takes me about 10 seconds to realize that the distant filtered music I hear is not broken headphones but the blaring of my external speaker in the middle of my quiet office.

This is compounded by the fact that, once you leave iPod or lock the phone it takes a few taps to get back to a place where you can hit pause. When I’m frantically trying to silence my phone I should be able to access some kind of “panic button” to instantly quiet the phone.

One would think this would be the silent button. At the absolute least, this should be a preference. Someone fix this. Someone fix this immediately.