All entries for Wednesday 08 October 2008

What the iPhone needs next…

I’ve had the device for almost three months now, using it as my only phone and portable internet device, so by now I’ve formed a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t for me. On the whole, I like the device a lot, and pretty much everything about it is just right. I have just three main items on my “wish list”.

• Copy and Paste: Until recently I didn’t really have a need for this. It is undeniably wrong that Apple don’t provide this functionality, but I didn’t miss it at all. Until I started using twitterific and wanted to copy URLs from safari into twitterific. And now I find the lack of copy/paste really frustrating.

• Flash: I know some people think the lack of flash is a good thing, but I don’t. Most video is presented on the web through Flash, and I’d quite like to be able to watch it on my iPhone. Especially the live streaming of terrestrial TV channels. There’s more to online video than YouTube…

• Background Applications: Using social networking apps on the move is frustrating when you need to have the app in the foreground for it to work. I’d like twitterific to run in the background and beep when new tweets come in. I’d like Fring to be able to take incoming VoIP calls. I’d like Palringo to be able to tell me when somebody wants to chat. All at once. Social networking will work much better when apps can get notification of incoming messages and do the appropriate thing.

These aren’t the only problems with the iPhone by any means, but they are the ones that annoy me most at the moment.

Steve Rumsby : 08 Oct 2008 10:00 |  Tags: Iphone |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem