I was asked today what I’d like to see in the iPhone. Leaving aside flights of fancy like direct download from the iTMS, a terminal client, a VNC client, text dictation, etc etc, I narrowed it down to a tiny handful of things that I think are reasonable expectations:
* Phone-side spam filtering, ideally feeding back to Yahoo or Google or whoever
* Support for the receipt of MMS. (They can always be sent in the form of e-mail, but not being able to receive them to a number kind of stinks)
* Multi-recipient SMS. (I admit, it breaks the carefully-crafted chat metaphor, but sometimes you gotta.)
* Some way to get text into the Notes app other than endless tapping. (Although I wouldn’t be surprised to see this sync with the Leopard version of Mail.)
My suspicion is that we’ll see a lot more things happen about the time that Leopard drops, especially in the sync area. Remember, it was supposed to be out by now, and inasmuch as the iPhone runs a version of OS X, it’s definitely Leopard (CoreAnimation is a critical part of the UI, and that’s 10.5 all the way). I wouldn’t mind seeing the new Movies widget in Dashboard as an iPhone app, though all things being equal I’m not sure I’d use one of the four remaining squares on that.
You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about ringtones. Not that I wouldn’t mind having Yakety Sax or the Vandy version of Also Sprach, but honestly, I almost *like* the extremely limited selection of ringers – it’s a nice backlash against the endless stream of bad hip-hop clips at $3 a throw. In fact, one of the best things about the iPhone is that AT&T was denied any control over UI or apps load – so it’s not burdened with “Cingular Video” or “My MEdia” or a 5-provider java mail client that replaced the perfectly useful open Moto mail piece. AT&T is a bug, not a feature, and if I had my way I’d be using this trick on T-Mob instead of Big Orange…but it wasn’t my call.
I’m still enjoying the hell out of the iPhone, make no mistake, but I find it’s not replacing the laptop when I’m at home on the couch. That’s not entirely surprising, just because 1200×800 beats the hell out of 480×320 any way you cut it. Especially when trying to catch up on a dozen feeds at once. But I am irritated that i can’t just touch the laptop screen and zoom in on Safari. =)