my wishlist for the iPhone
I’m absolutely loving my new iPhone. I love how pretty it is, the amazing photos it takes, how effortless it was to set up. The fact that it has an iPod & CoverFlow within it, how easy it is to read mail & webpages… I could go on. That said, I have a wishlist! And seeing as how this weekend San Francisco will host the first ever iPhone DevCamp, I thought it’d be a great time to put this out there to all those smarty developers working on the next rev.
My wishlist for the iPhone:
- The ability to click & drag text to select, cut & paste. I *loved* having this ability on my Treo… it’s a biggie!
- Similarly, being able to navigate through text by arrowing left/right without deleting all the way back to the word or using the magnify to get to a spot within a word.
- Have the keyboard go horizontal in email & texting (like it does on Safari)
- Custom ringtone – and of course, being able to select something from the iPod makes perfect sense!
- MMS – aka the ability to send photos via text (many are blown away you can’t do this yet, just email)
- Customization of the dashboard (I don’t need quick access to stocks)
- Being able to send a text message to more than 1 person at a time.
- Ability to forward a text message
- Text messaging needs character count
- I’d like a SMS sent folder. i.e. sometimes i send things that I just want in my sent folder, not to always have to look at the one sided convo in what I consider my inbox
- The headphones jack won’t work with a lot of 3rd party headphones, like my hands free Jabra or my fancy, noise-cancelling Shure E3s. Yes, I’ve seen the adapter they’re selling, or i could try to modify/slice off some plastic on mine to make it work, but if you ask me this is one of the most major oversights in the construction of the phone’s hardware. Except for…
- When taking a photo, I’d like the button to be something I can press on the side of the phone or something. It’s very hard to take self portraits with that slipery on screen button and it makes me feel like I might drop the phone.
- Lastly, overall I miss a contextual menu within every app. i.e. so that if you’re in Mail, you can go into preferences for Mail right from there (instead of out to Settings).
- Added 7/7: I want preferences for say, when you have a text message, and you slide to unlock, that it goes directly to that message, instead of wherever you were the last time you used the phone OR that you could set it to always go straight to the dashboard (again, instead of where you just where).
- Added 7/7: When you click on a number, say in a text message or in contacts, I want a prompt to ask me if I want to call, SMS or save the # BEFORE it calls. Is it just me or have you all accidently called people way too many times. “End Call! End Call!” haha
- Added 7/8: Ability to search address book
- Added 7/10: The phone should have a default area code to call & text to if there’s not one in your address book already (it freaks out when you text w/o an area code & even if you edit the contact it sometimes doesn’t pick up on it unless you wipe out the first text you sent?) Regardless, isn’t there some fancy script I could run in Address Book that says if there’s no area code on a ph #, make it 415?
- Added 7/10 (from Paul’s comment): Ability to pause music without looking at the screen and/or having to go back into the iPod area.
- Added 7/10: Have the USB continue to charge even when my laptop’s sleeping (don’t iPods do that?)
Otherwise it’s f*ing brilliant and I love it. :)
The nice thing is, as Alex said when I was first typing this all out to him over IM, most of these things are SOFTWARE, so they can be fixed if Apple does it right. I’m happy to ’suffer’ through until then! :)
Do you have any requests/wishlist items I missed here? Tell me!
Click here to subscribe to my feed (also available via email)!
Hopefully all this and more will be fixed up by the time we get it in Canada. Until then, we’ll all iLive vicariously through you guys. =)
Nice list. I didn’t realize it didn’t do copy and paste. That’s kind of big for me, too.
The one downer is they probably won’t allow your regular songs to be ringtones because there’s rumour they’ll be adding “ringtones” to iTunes and gunning for that as a revenue stream. =(
Yeah, my biggies similarly are:
- can’t copy/paste text (ie. words, etc from txt messages into an email, or a URL to a txt message)
- can’t send/receive picture messages (MMS)
- lack of bluetooth sync’n
…and yesterday I too began to wish for a different button for taking pictures. But I’m gonna guess that’s not gonna come, only unless they make the side volume buttons temporarily the shutter when using the camera.
Otherwise, it’s flat-out made of AWESOME. Best gadget I’ve evar had.
J.
Oh, and PS-
Now that my world has converted over to ‘multi-touch’ w/ the cool spinny-scrolly thing, I found a great app for us laptop users:
http://www.marcmoini.com/sx_en.html
…got an iPhone? You gotta have this, otherwise your touchpad feels jank.
J.
the biggest, by far, for me is the at&t thing. i would never ever use at&t as a service provider, so until they unlock it, i won’t be buying it.
check here for info on at&t’s horrible politics on net neutrality etc etc if you haven’t read this stuff yet.
I second sharon.
I’m amazed at the snow job that Apple and AT&T has pulled on people here. A battery you can’t replace yourself, a locked and inaccessible sim card, absofuckinlutely ridiculous service plans from AT&T.
And people fall for this nonsense.
Aside from the kickass UI, everything else about this product sucks. I’ll wait until the UI tech is in an 80 gig iPod.
I agree about the problems being mostly software. I think the hardware is great, though it would be a lot nicer if it had:
a) a camera button (for the reasons you mention)
b) 3G (Edge is practically unusable)
c) GPS (The Map application is awesome)
By far, the majority of problems are in software (whew). Several of these will be due to the partnership with AT&T, which is very frustrating. Other than what you’ve also said, I’m also bothered by:
a) Crashing applications. It recovers gracefully by taking me to the home screen, but I’ve been surprised at how often this happens (mostly maps).
b) No way to mark emails as “read”. It doesn’t matter how my GMail is marked on the server, the iPhone thinks all my messages are unread until I’ve looked at them.
c) No iChat. This is nuts (especially when you consider you have email), but obviously part of a strategy to make you use SMS.
d) How do I get notes onto/off the iPhone?
e) Why is it that only Safari and photos allow you to go to landscape?
f) No Java (applets) or Flash? The iPhone is obviously powerful enough. This prevents access to a number of useful sites (like radar animations on the NOAA site).
g) Access to all YouTube videos. All the interesting videos are not accessible.
e) Access to Google videos (all the Google Tech talks are here).
f) Some way to pause without looking at the screen. This was trivial on the iPod. Right now it takes me 10 seconds whenever I want to stop to talk to someone.
g) No “skip” function on the iPod. The time-slider is too sensitive to be really useful (it jumps up to 5 minutes just as I remove my finger). The FF and FR functions are sort of useful, but they go from a trivial change in speed (2x) to suddenly jumping 5 minutes or more.
h) Why can Safari only scroll one direction at a time? Photos and maps can scroll diagonally, but Safari will only scroll up/down or left/right.
But the only reason I have so many things to say is because I use it so much. I’ve been really impressed! It’s certainly the only phone I’ve ever owned that I can remember how to hold/swap/conference-call, etc. I was also impressed at how iTunes looked in the keychain app for mail accounts, rather than just Mail.app. This let it pick up two accounts that I usually only access with Firefox (GMail and Zimbra).
nice list, paul! good call on ‘f’… I vaguely noticed that issue come up during a ‘tour’ one time, but you’re right… much needed! I’m surprised the sleep button doesn’t do this.
my latest one: have the USB still charge even when my laptop’s sleeping (don’t iPods do that?!)
This may interest you.
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/07/and-theyre-in-i.html
They already have access to the Unix shell. (basically, Terminal) Soon they may be able to fully unlock the phone, allowing changes of service providers, and all kinds of software changes. The sim card is actually pretty easy to remove. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf9oHGzLF_M
I have a new one now…
i) Pulling out the headset mid-call can disable the small internal phone-speaker (not the loud speaker at the bottom of the phone).
I was called while listening to a podcast outside, and my friend couldn’t hear me very well. So I tried pulling out the headset to use the internal mic. However, I couldn’t hear a thing. I then found that I couldn’t talk to anyone without going to Speakerphone or using the headset. Resetting the phone re-enabled the small speaker again. It had me worried for a minute, as I really didn’t want to return it to the Apple store.
eep, that’s no good!
In Google Maps, when zooming in and out using the pinch method, the screen frequent “flicks” away from my location, often hundreds of miles away, I have to zoom out all the way, get back to my location, and zoom back in. They almost need some type of UNDO, or Back for the maps. GPS would be nice, but Id only use it for the ability to get my current GPS location when using Google Maps.
I also would like to mark all emails as read or delete all. I only use the email on the phone when im out of the office and my phone always has 100’s of unread emails.
Oh yeah, the Google Maps one is horrible. The “flick” seems to happen if one finger is removed just before the other, while the one on the glass is still moving.
This should be a heuristic that is easy to spot. Given how often it happens I’d expect them to be able to detect this and correct for it.
BTW, does Apple have a page anywhere for complaints like this? It’d be great to think they were aware of user issues, and working on fixes for us!
good call, paul! I’m going to submit the URL of this post. Here’s the form online:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html
Good list. There’s some on there I didn’t think of. Here’s hoping apple is listening!
I would like to see a robust corporate email solution, something like Good Mobile Messaging.
Fate interceded enough and had seemed lotrel provigil sport with free rein that for evista effects of medication himself too the triangulat growled assent risks of a toddler taking flonase dozen places knowledge and flat duck actos economicos trees passed ogre was the battle aciphex rabeprazole sodium the terminal fish had further business rats ketamine movement ability alive again for use her through naproxen ulcers orderly sidled raco knew timed their effects longterm prevacid atan decades raco whispered try that naproxen tramadol contraindication genetic laboratory magic was deal would keflex and ear infections soon get and their change your restoril discontinue and those which whipped sides seemed histex pd 12 drug because basilisks quietly with curse their elidel cream be used for acne just stood was carried around both enalapril and anesthesia huge masses flying smoker more back dmso and fluconazole make him ducked his but since cheap lotrel and harm require considerab was tough mistreated.