So there’s this iPhone 3.0 “event” tomorrow, where Apple tells you what they are planning.
Will there be a new iPhone? We don’t know.
When is iPhone 3.0 available? We don’t know.
Here’s what I hope will be in there.
1) Copy and Paste - Yeah, we keep saying it, but if it isn’t there by now, this is going to be a serious shortcoming. It’s been almost 2 years now. This is well beyond “Duh”. I only hope it isn’t a big part of the announcement because there are more important/bigger things to talk about.
2) Unified INBOX - I’ve got 5 email accounts on there, and having to tap tap tap tap tap tap tap to get from one to the other is absurd.
3) Auto-Brightness That Works. If you go to Preferences > Settings > Brightness there’s an On/Off switch for auto-brightness.
Right now it does…something. But it doesn’t do what I want it to do, which is:
a) Detect when I am somewhere bright and crank up to 100%.
b) Detect when I am in a dark room and crank down to about 10%
This doesn’t seem like brain rockets, but as someone who uses his iPhone at the dark, it would be really nice if this worked
4) “Live” Turn By Turn GPS - I tried to use my iPhone as a GPS one day when I didn’t have my regular GPS. By which I mean I went the wrong way. I came to an intersection and had to turn left or right and wasn’t sure which way to go and couldn’t reach over to manually update my iPhone Google Maps “fake GPS”.
Sure it will be a battery suck, which is why I have a car adapter for my iPhone. Give me real GPS!
5) Email Full Size Pictures - whether it is to my family, Flickr, or MobileMe, I want to be able to get pictures off my iPhone without them being downsized.
6) Let Me Remove Built-in Apps - There’s never been a better time to remove the “Stocks” app from your iPhone. And I prefer Wunderground’s iPhone Interface to the built-in weather app because it doesn’t suck. They don’t actually have to be “Deleted” as long as they “Do Not Appear”
7) Stop asking me for my iTunes password to download free apps and/or updates to apps I have already paid for - Make passwords meaningful by only asking for them when I really need them. What is the purpose of asking me for my password for free apps/updates? Are you afraid someone has gotten ahold of my iPhone and is improving it without my consent?
8) Drag and drop files to/from the iPhone - I know there are scads of apps that will do this for me. I’ve bought several of them. But what I want is something built-in. Bonus points if I can do it over WiFi/Bluetooth (HA HA HA…No, seriously, that will never happen, but it would be cool.)
9) Bluetooth keyboard - I’ve got a MacBook, and I’ve got an eeePC running OS X, but there would still be times I would use an iPhone plus keyboard. By basic rule of thumb is this: if my Treo 650 could do it, my iPhone should be able to do it.
10) Background apps and/or notifications manager - I want music players besides iTunes to be able to keep playing after I push the “Home” button. I want IM apps to be able to poll in the background. A sub-set of this wish is for PUSH/IDLE IMAP support for any server, not just Yahoo. Because a) does that actually work for anyone? It never has for me; and b) Yahoo? Really? You gave Yahoo an exclusive feature on the iPhone? Why?
We were told that background apps are a bad idea, but Apple was willing to give us a notifications manager which would be released back in September.
Except it wasn’t.
And that was 6 months ago.
I fully expect that we will hear something about this tomorrow. I hope it is fixed and I hope it is deployed soon.
So there are my 10 things. I didn’t set out to make them 10, but 10 came to me, and then I stopped. Most of these aren’t new features, they are improvements to existing features.
I have no idea if any of these will happen (I expect #1 to happen and #10 to be “addressed”) the rest of them are wishes more than predictions.
Unless I’m right, obviously.