Desired features lacking in iPhone
I have been using my iPhone for more than two weeks, and other than having to swap out my first iPhone at the Apple Store because of dropped calls and other call problems (which may or may not be fixed by my replacement iPhone), i enjoy using it. That said, many basic features that i expect to have in a cellphone are missing in the iPhone. Most, if not all, of the features listed in the table below can be added/improved by upgrading the firmware, so it’s really up to Apple to decide which of them are essential enough to be included in the next firmware upgrade.
I look forward to the day when i can change this 
or 
to this 
.
|
Features |
Version 1.0 |
Comment |
| Phone | ||
| Contacts | ||
| Search function | |
This is a must for power users. How do i search for everyone on my Contacts that works for IBM? |
| Assign contact to group/s | |
Currently, this can only be done in Address Book on a Mac. |
| Ability to clear All/Missed call lists separately | |
Right now, pressing the “Clear” button in “Recents” call list will clear both the “All” and “Missed” call lists. |
| Call forwarding | Right now, turning on call forwarding will forward all calls. Being able to selectively call forward on different situations has been available in almost all my previous cellphones. | |
| Call forward when busy | |
|
| Call forward when no answer | |
|
| Call forward when unavailable | |
|
| Voice-activated dialing | |
|
| Speakerphone | |
Very weak speakerphone. Unusable in a moving vehicle or noisy environment. |
| Personalized ringtones | |
|
| Personalized system sounds | |
|
| Sound recording / Voice notes | |
This basic feature is available in my three previous phones. |
| Copy and Paste text | |
|
| Direction keypad | |
The magnifying glass is nice to play with initially, for about 5 minutes, but it has its bugs and limitations, and it is not a replacement for the direction buttons. |
| Search | |
A Spotlight-like search will be nice. |
| Choice to switch to call when on EDGE network | |
Right now, if you are on the EDGE network, all the voice calls will go to your voicemail. |
| Messaging | ||
| SMS | SMS is designed to be like iChat but unfortunately, the biggest flaw of this design is that it is impossible to resend/forward any text messages, including the ones that failed to go out. | |
| Send to more than one recipient | |
|
| Received Folder | |
See comment on SMS. |
| Sent Folder | |
See comment on SMS. |
| Draft Folder | |
See comment on SMS. |
| Template Folder | |
See comment on SMS. |
| MMS | |
|
| Delete multiple emails | |
It may be fun at first to delete each email by sliding your finger across each one. Try doing that for more than 10 emails. |
| Empty trash | |
Emails in the trash are meant to be emptied with one key press, not one by one. |
| Mark multiple email as read/unread | |
|
| Attach photo as attachment when replying | |
|
| Save email attachments | |
|
| Web Browser | ||
| Flash support | |
It may be the best browser on a mobile device, but without support for Flash, iPhone is not a full-featured browser. |
| AJAX support | |
Not all the categories show up when i tried to blog using wordpress. |
| Javascript support | |
|
| Scroll back/forward multiple pages | |
Right now, Safari can only scroll back/forward one page at a time. |
| Open link to a new page | |
|
| Imaging and Video | ||
| Optical zoom | |
|
| Digital zoom | |
|
| White Balance | |
|
| Video recording | |
Even the most basic camera-equiped cellphone has this capability. |
| Connectivity | ||
| WIFI | ||
| Synchronization (email, contacts, calendar) | |
|
| Bluetooth | ||
| File transfer (to/from Mac/PC) | |
|
| File transfer to another BT enabled phone | |
|
| Send/Receive contact/s to/from another BT enabled phone | |
|
| Synchronization (email, contacts, calendar) | |
A BT-enabled phone and yet i can’t synchronize wirelessly with my Powerbook? |
| GSM dial-up support | |
|
| Multimedia | ||
| Quicktime | |
Amazingly, i can’t even transfer the movie trailers i downloaded from Apple’s movie trailer site to the phone. iTunes won’t accept it. |
| Other formats | |
No other video formats currently supported. |
| Third Party Apps | ||
| Java MIDP 2.0 | |
|
| Salling Clicker | |
This handy OS X-orginated app even works on my Windows-mobile based HP phone. And yet, i can’t install it on my iPhone because Apple says no to third-party apps. |
| Over-the-air download/install of Java apps | |
Thank you for taking the time to put together an exhaustive list.
The one problem I saw right away and I’m surprised that no one else is reporting it is the lack of a file upload capability from the iPhone to a web site. Let’s say you have taken some photos and you want to upload them to a website like Costco to get prints. Well you can’t because the file selection control is disabled.
Personally I spent about 2 months getting iTeams.mobi ready so that parents could upload pictures of the kids sports game directly from their iPhone. Every other Internet enabled cellphone I’ve seen has that capability. The iPhone came up short. I returned the iPhone on iDay 1. Hopefully Apple gets their act together and fixes the things that many people expected to be in the iPhone but wasnt.
Thanks again for the list.
I have your page book marked.
-Ak
Thanks for bringing the file upload from Safari up. I did mention in my previous post on “Blogging from iPhone” that i was not able to upload the pictures that i had taken with my iPhone to my website using Safari. I have this feeling that Apple may install Flickr app onto the phone in the near future to allow photos from the iPhone to be uploaded directly to Flickr but in my opinion, the easiest way is to allow photos to be uploaded from Safari.
I think this is due, unfortunately, to Apple’s requirement for every iPhone user to go through iTunes in order to get files (as limited as it is now) on and off the iPhone.
Have you seen this blog entry before? http://www.applehound.com/node/104
Maybe you can try to recreate problems that are kinda hard to repeat.
Joe Hutsko on MSNBC has a list of 25 wishes for iPhones.
desired HW features:
32GB flash memory capacity
Haptic feedback
Removable battery
desired SW features:
Copy-paste feature
Handwriting recognition feature
To do list application
Adobe Flash capability
Video recording application
EBook application