I’ve had a few days with an iPhone and I’m very impressed with the form factor and the interface, not so impressed with ATT’s service options, a skinny features set, and so I have to list what I hope will show up in a subsequent system update.
Let me backtrack a bit and explain that I was a devout Newton user for much the 90’s. I used an eMate
ultimately (I had also used an MP, an MP100, and a 130) which had extraordinary battery life, serial and printer access,
a pcmia slot and very efficient software/developer tools and a devout community behind all of it.
I totally understood why Apple dropped the Newton in shoring up the product line and killing a huge drain on resources on an elite sort of tool, but it was an awesome device that incorporated a lot of what is present in the iPhone, although the iPhone is truly in the “baby” stages of functionality.
The Newton did a cool thing where if you filled in some information you could get access to that information in another application easily.
Data, such as contact information, was saved in a “soup” and you could draw from that “soup”
in any application that need it. So if you needed to use an address in a letter, and that address was in you
address book, you had immediate access to it- you could even drag and drop it in (the clipboard in the Newton allowed you to “dock” text strings and drop them anywhere).
You’ll notice the lack of “save” buttons in the iPhone. This is a result of persistent memory,caching and (hopefully) smartgarbage collection.On the iPhone there’s this Notes application, but it’s really not what people expect to have to Jot things down. It’s just kind of lame function wise. You can’t even print from it. WTF?
Besides, the Landscape keyboard thing is NOT pervasive on the iPhone and I would list that as the number one
future feature implementation.
I’ve already sent feedback to Apple about features to be implemented so I’ll list them here and add a few more
suggestions:
I’m hoping a software update is forthcoming.
I’d like to see:
Ipod music manual management, drag and drop
The iPod on the iPhone doees not behave like an iPod. It should. This is not a “little brother” like the shuffle,
It should be a full featured ipod.
Better Dock connector support
(my monster cable will only charge but not route audio
through the connector..as does my 3 g ipod) I should be able to play this iPod through my computer and my
monster ipod adapter.
Some software tools for the camera pre-photo capture.
The camera is nice, but it would be better if you could dabble with exposure controls a bit. Since there’s no flash,
this would help in the available light situations.
A widget manager for new software, and a way to turn off software I don’t want.
Uh SMS? I’d rather have ichat….can’t I just get rid of it?
Newton Style Speech and Text tools….
I want Victoria or Fred to read me my calendar. Drag and Drop clipboard and selection. A better keyboard or
incorporate configurable gestures.
Other Stuff
File management. Bluetooth Sync. Disk mounting. Network browsing, Printing, Flash support, RSS support.
I’ll add more as I think of them…
This is an OSX based machine, so I would think Pages and Keynote (maybe mini versions of such) would find their way
here…
-that’s all for now-
owl