iPhone Wishlist

I’ve been an iPhone user since the first weekend the 3G came out, and so far I love it. Prior to the iPhone, I was a Blackberry user for a while. My reasons for waiting to change were:

  1. My contract with Verizon conveniently ended the same month the 3G came out.
  2. AT&T had lousy coverage at my home and office. However, for some reason AT&T and Verizon swapped in the months leading up to the 3G coming out. Verizon started to have lousy coverage in my home, and I changed job locations. The new location had lousy Verizon coverage.
  3. The price drop made it a great time to upgrade my wife as well. There was no way I was going to get away with a 1st gen iPhone without my wife getting one as well. With penalties, that would have been $1550 instead of $400. I like Apple stuff, but I’m not that big a fan boy.

Fast forward several months, and I’m not looking back to my Blackberry (ever), but there are a few minor issues with the iPhone that I wish Apple would fix. It’s been long enough now that I’m starting to wonder when/if these may happen.

No Indicators on the Locked Page

Why make me slide the bar and enter my code just to see whether I have voicemail or email? It doesn’t seem to be that hard to have a couple of indicators on the locked page to let me know. This would be a great time saver and a good compromise away from that annoying blinking LED on the Blackberries.

No Sound Presets

To change any of the sound settings, I have to go in and update each separately. Having something like Night, Office, Silent, etc. would be great. The silent switch is good, but sometimes I really want silence, and others I want the phone to still vibrate.

Related to this, I want different sound settings for each email account as well. For example, I have error emails from my site(s) sent to me. I want those to complain loudly regardless of what I have setup for other volumes.

The Blackberry does this well.

Signatures for Each Email Account

I have three email accounts configured on my iPhone. I prefer to separate my email signatures between work and personal. Again, I could do this on a Blackberry.

One Global Inbox

It would be a lot easier to read my email if there was a single Inbox where all three of my accounts show up. This is what Apple Mail does on my desktop, and I use it all the time. Right now, I have to go through the follow set of interactions for each account:

  1. Tap Personal account
  2. Tap Inbox
  3. Read/Process inbox
  4. Tap Personal to go back
  5. Tap Accounts to go back
  6. Tap Work
  7. Tap Inbox
  8. Read/Process inbox
  9. Tap Work to go back
  10. Tap Accounts to go back
  11. etc.

Lot of tapping going on here! Give me a consolidated inbox, and life would be a lot easier for those of us with multiple email accounts. Did I mention I could do this on my Blackberry?

Notice I did not say copy/paste. In seven months, I think I could have used it twice. I can see Apple making the correct decision to cater to the 80% of users out there and not the reviewers.

Don’t get me wrong, I will not go back to a Blackberry without a fight, but give me the above, and I will be an even happier camper.

Excuse me, I have to take a call now…


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5 responses to “iPhone Wishlist”

  1. Mike Furtak Avatar

    Hey Dave:
    For an idea of where Apple may be heading with regard to “lock screen” indicators, check out this post:

    http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2008/11/21/patent-watch-alwayson-iphone-status-indicators/

    -Mike

  2. Dave Avatar

    Nice! I like it! Thanks for the info.

  3. Adam Avatar

    I like to see the following in iphone:
    1) Support for MMS (currently it’s not available thru AT&T)
    2) Support for Tethering (currently it’s not available thru AT&T)
    3) GPS to have turn-by-turn directions
    4) Ability to set the status to meeting which enables silent mode with vibrate for specific amount of time. (for example meeting till 5pm, after 5pm phone goes in normal mode automatically, My old Nokia phone had this feature which I miss it greatly).

  4. Dave Avatar

    1) I’m not holding my breath for MMS since I don’t see myself a big user of it.2) Not having the ability to tether without jail breaking really ticks me off. Come AT&T, get with the program. I’m on the train for 2 hours every day, and being able to connect to the internet would be really helpful.
    3) In theory, this is coming with iPhone 3.0. However, to really make it work you might have to hook up to another appliance because most phone’s GPS is not accurate enough. I think I saw that Garmin is coming out with one.
    4) I’m OK with things not going into meeting mode. However, I would like to have more than two modes.

    I will be upgrading to iPhone 3.0 tomorrow and see what I get. Since I’m still only 1 year into my contract, I will not be updating to the 3Gs. Hopefully, something better will be around when I’m ready to replace my phone.

  5. molecule Avatar

    “The price drop made it a great time to upgrade my wife as well.”
    Where do you upgrade a wife round here, and how much does it cost?

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