BRIAN MORRIS TECHNOLOGY SERVICES

My iPhone Wish List from Apple’s developers

[UPDATED 6/30/10, updates in red]

I really love my iPhone. It makes me so much more productive and easy to reach via IM, text, email, phone. It’s like having my home computer in my pocket. However, with heavy use, there are bugs that I’ve found and improvements that would make it much better. I will update this list as things change.

POPULAR COMPLAINTS:

1. No Adobe Flash compatibility. From reading, there are apparently performance and security reasons that Apple doesn’t have Flash on the iPhone. It seems to close of a good portion of the internet from viewing things online.  Hmm, this will never happen.  This seems to be pushing web developers away from Flash, but it is still very prominent.
2. Add text message/mail alert custom sounds. Just like I can add my own ringtones, let me add my own alert tones, too!  Still no.
3. Google Latitude. This webapp is ok, but very limited in real-time updating from what I’ve experienced. Apple – allow the app!  No change.
4. Lock orientation. I wish I could lock the rotation from any screen for easy vertical reading!  iOS 4 allows portrait lock, but not landscape.  This is a big improvement.

SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS

1. Delete auto-saved email addresses. When you send an email to someone, the iPhone will remember it forever. That’s fine, but a few weeks ago I got an email from a friend that was actually an email from her hacked account. I replied to all and told them to disregard it. How all of my friend’s contacts are in my phone. I hate that! From reading, I can’t delete them. Just let me swipe to delete when their name is suggested!
2. Add multiple voicemail greetings. I wish that I could keep my default outgoing voicemail greeting intact and record a secondary one for when I’m on vacation or other reasons.  This is probably an AT&T limitation (or all carriers).
3. Date/time stamp on pictures. In the camera roll, I wish I could find the date and time the picture was taken. All digital cameras, and even my old RAZR, had this functionality. I still can’t find dates/times.
4. Battery central. I wish you could touch the battery icon and it would bring up a “battery central” page. This would give you one page access to things that have the biggest impract to your battery life. It would have: Location Services, Bluetooth, Wifi, 3G, Fetching, etc. It would even be nice to push your favorite battery saver service next to the clock so you could turn it on/off instantly. I’m always turning off Location Services because of the battery sucking it does, but it makes many apps not functional.
5. Navigate quicker to various app pages. It can be very annoying to go from my Home screen to the 10th app page. I wish I could touch the 10th dot and get right to it.  This is improvement with app folder organization.

ANNOYANCES

1. Loading emails. Some emails will not fully load and you have to click a message requesting it load load the rest. I hate the fact that it kicks you back to the beginning of the message, requiring you to figure out on your own where you were.  iOS has fixed this!
2. Safari loses your place. (a) If you are reading something and turn the orientation of the phone, it will not keep the same line at the top of the screen. (b) If you are reading a long article, leave Safari, and come back the next day, Safari will reload (like it or not) and lose your place and kick you back to the beginning. So annoying!  This is still an issue.

BUGS

1. Rotate Safari’s keyboard. If you hit the address bar or search box in Safari, your orientation is locked and you can’t change the keyboard from portrait to landscape or vise versa. If you need to use the landscape keyboard, you must get Safari in landscape before you hit those boxes. Hopefully they’ll fix this sometime.  This was fixed with iOS 4.