Willo O'Brien

I’m absolutely loving my new iPhone. I love how pretty it is, the amazing photos it takes, how effortless it was to set up. The fact that it has an iPod & CoverFlow within it, how easy it is to read mail & webpages… I could go on. That said, I have a wishlist! And seeing as how this weekend San Francisco will host the first ever iPhone DevCamp, I thought it’d be a great time to put this out there to all those smarty developers working on the next rev.

My wishlist for the iPhone:

• The ability to click & drag text to select, cut & paste. I *loved* having this ability on my Treo… it’s a biggie!
• Similarly, being able to navigate through text by arrowing left/right without deleting all the way back to the word or using the magnify to get to a spot within a word.
• Have the keyboard go horizontal in email & texting (like it does on Safari)
• Custom ringtone – and of course, being able to select something from the iPod makes perfect sense!
• MMS – aka the ability to send photos via text (many are blown away you can’t do this yet, just email)
• Customization of the dashboard (I don’t need quick access to stocks)
• Being able to send a text message to more than 1 person at a time.
• Ability to forward a text message
• Text messaging needs character count
• I’d like a SMS sent folder. i.e. sometimes i send things that I just want in my sent folder, not to always have to look at the one sided convo in what I consider my inbox
• The headphones jack won’t work with a lot of 3rd party headphones, like my hands free Jabra or my fancy, noise-cancelling Shure E3s. Yes, I’ve seen the adapter they’re selling, or i could try to modify/slice off some plastic on mine to make it work, but if you ask me this is one of the most major oversights in the construction of the phone’s hardware. Except for…
• When taking a photo, I’d like the button to be something I can press on the side of the phone or something. It’s very hard to take self portraits with that slipery on screen button and it makes me feel like I might drop the phone.
• Lastly, overall I miss a contextual menu within every app. i.e. so that if you’re in Mail, you can go into preferences for Mail right from there (instead of out to Settings).
• Added 7/7: I want preferences for say, when you have a text message, and you slide to unlock, that it goes directly to that message, instead of wherever you were the last time you used the phone OR that you could set it to always go straight to the dashboard (again, instead of where you just where).
• Added 7/7: When you click on a number, say in a text message or in contacts, I want a prompt to ask me if I want to call, SMS or save the # BEFORE it calls. Is it just me or have you all accidently called people way too many times. “End Call! End Call!” haha
• Added 7/8: Ability to search address book
• Added 7/10: The phone should have a default area code to call & text to if there’s not one in your address book already (it freaks out when you text w/o an area code & even if you edit the contact it sometimes doesn’t pick up on it unless you wipe out the first text you sent?) Regardless, isn’t there some fancy script I could run in Address Book that says if there’s no area code on a ph #, make it 415?
• Added 7/10 (from Paul’s comment): Ability to pause music without looking at the screen and/or having to go back into the iPod area.
• Added 7/10: Have the USB continue to charge even when my laptop’s sleeping (don’t iPods do that?)

Otherwise it’s f*ing brilliant and I love it. :)

The nice thing is, as Alex said when I was first typing this all out to him over IM, most of these things are SOFTWARE, so they can be fixed if Apple does it right. I’m happy to ‘suffer’ through until then! :)

Do you have any requests/wishlist items I missed here? Tell me!