I've played with iPhone off and on ever since it launched, but this week I finally decided to swap out my BlackBerry and start using iPhone exclusively (more on why later). The brilliant browser, great media support, and gorgeous fonts/display make a huge impact, but there're a lot of things missing from iPhone that makes it a less-than-perfect experience, and leaves me longing for my BlackBerry pretty frequently.
So, as I'll be eagerly awaiting the new iPhone software at WWDC, here's my short wishlist for the next couple revs of iPhone software.
- Copy and paste. Yes, everyone's mentioned this already... but creating calendar events is a pain when you can't just copy-paste straight from an email.
- Search in the address book. Scrolling through the address book is probably okay with a couple hundred contacts, but is pretty laborious with a couple thousand.
- Faster auto-complete in email addresses. iPhone is strangely slow when it comes to being able to search through your address book when you start typing a recipient's name for an email.
- Faster SMS. Loading the SMS chat screens seems to be quite slow on iPhone.
- Better eMail UI. I've got three email addresses set up on iPhone. The number of taps to see a message is enormous. Home -> Mail Accounts -> Chosen Account -> Inbox -> Message is annoying and slow. Single inbox like BlackBerry, please.
- Signatures for each account. So each email address should have it's own signature, instead of the one global email signature. A requirement if you've got corporate and personal mail on the same device.
- It would be great if iPhone could extract contact and event details straight from an eMail just like Mail.app does on Leopard.
- Info on the lock-screen. I shouldn't need to slide to unlock and then enter my PIN just to find out if I have any new mail or not. It'd be great if the lockout screen showed missed calls, SMS and eMail.
- To-do list. A striking omission.
- A better calendar. Yikes... entering calendar events on iPhone is a chore... can't click the time I want straight on the screen. There's no weekly view (a shame, as it'd look great in landscape view on iPhone). Events don't support time zones.
- Working push. The Yahoo! Push solution has been (for me) very flaky and far from a reliable push experience. I hope this gets solved for the next rev. Integrating push for GMail would also be lovely :-)
Maybe a hard-button or two on the casing wouldn't be such a bad thing either. I love the minimalist design of iPhone, but a couple extra hard-buttons might make it a whole lot easier to get to your favourite apps, and that can't be a bad thing.
Fingers crossed ... just a couple weeks till WWDC :)
