Last week was pretty big for me, on a personal level: I upgraded both my phone's hardware (ditched my 'old' 1st generation iPhone for the latest 3GS) and software (the latest 3.0 software). So, if I were to die tomorrow, could I say that I've seen all I wanted to see out of Steve Jobs' brain child? almost, but not quite yet.
The single biggest improvement in the 3.0 OS for me was the landscape keyboard. I love being able to SMS and e-mail in landscape mode, it's seriously made me feel like the phone could really start to replace the netbook, at least for what I need. Spotlight is pretty cool, finally seeing copy and paste was like an old wound suddenly no longer itching, and the speed improvements are quite noticeable. So what's missing?
Wi-Fi, scheduled syncing
I'm a big fan of software performing tasks that I would otherwise need to do. When I get up in the morning, I want my podcasts all synced up for when I go the gym and then to work. I don't want to have to worry about it. I should be able to not only sync the iPhone wirelessly, but also to schedule it. So if I want to sync it automatically at 6 a.m. (an hour after iTunes checked for podcast updates), I should be able to. Wirelessly.
A lot more control over the typing correction process
This may seem like a minor thing at first, but I use my iPhone to take all sorts of notes from ideas to blog posts to algorithms. I can summarize my beefs in three points:
- You can't control what happens by default: if you type a word that is not in the dictionary and slightly off, when the correction box pop-up you have to touch it or it will auto-correct it. I understand that a lot of people like it that way, but I don't. I should be able to configure it so that the opposite happens: I have to confirm that I want to change it.
- You can't edit the dictionary: come on. Let me add some words that I use all the time that are not in the stock dictionary. It shouldn't be that difficult to implement.
- No visual indication when a word is not in the dictionary. It can be subtle, but I'd like to see (provided I can edit it). It would be a nice proofreading capability.
Safari functional improvements
I should probably say before anything else that Apple needs to allow other browsers on the platform. Only having Safari reminds me of the Microsoft era of forcing IE down everyone's throat. Anyway... here are the beefs:
- No ability to search the pages: I was pretty surprised by this given the spotlight and mail search additions. I'd like to be able to type keywords and see where in the page they occur. Basic browser functionality really.
- No ability to save the pages: if I know I'm about to hop on a 4 hour plane I'd like to be able to save a few long-ish articles to read while offline. Sometimes the cache expires on the web page quicker than I'd like and I can't view the pages I was looking at.
More access to the OS
Overall, and I realize this is probably not something Apple will do for reasons I won't get into here, I wish I had more access to the OS. I wish I could open a terminal window and run quick python one-liners in the interpreter. I wish I could play with it more. I understand that a lot of this can be done via jailbreaking but I shouldn't have to. I should have a legal way of playing with the guts of the machine.
That's about it really. In the grand scheme of things these are small things, but I don't think that any of them would be that difficult to implement.