iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone iPhone!!!11 Presumably we’ll see a new iPhone tomorrow, and not a moment too soon. I have an iPhone, and I’m happier with it than I’ve been with any phone I’ve had in the past (though probably less happy, all together, than I was with my IM-capable Blackberry pager circa 1997), but it has always had some serious deficiencies that I’d like to see corrected. They’re nearly all software things.

Here’s my personal wish list:

1. More buttons. The iPhone is very elegant and sleek and so forth; but it really needs about two more physical buttons. The slide-the-thing-on-the-screen thing to unlock it is very zippy, but it’s difficult to do with one hand; and the fact that the UI navigation is structured almost entirely as a tree means that you’ve got to keep returning to the main menu to do things. It would be nice to have a couple physical buttons that could be programmed for quick access to certain functions, and that could be used in some combination as an unlock sequence.

I doubt we’ll see this.

2. Better-differentiated icons. I use this thing every day, right? Many times. And I still find myself searching for the calendar icon, or the clock icon, or whatever. All the icons are the same shape, which makes them harder to tell apart without actively looking at every one of them.

3. Non-SMS IM capability. The iPhone has a great interface for SMS, ripped right from iChat on the Mac. But SMSes are slow, and they’re ruinously expensive. SMSes are charged by the message, not the byte, but a couple weeks ago I saw an analysis that concluded that SMS data costs £374.49 — about $750 — per megabyte, or about 3.3 US cents to send:

To send this post, to this point, would cost about $1.37. And in many cases it would actually cost more like $2.74, because both the sender and the recipient pay. This is nuts.

Proper IM capability would require something on the other end, not just something on the phone, though: mobile phones go in and out of coverage, and keeping the radio going all the time to keep a normal network connection alive would kill the batteries in short order. It’s a solved problem, though, and it needs to be solved on the iPhone. This is the kind of thing that should come with the iPhone (IM networks are more valuable the more people are on them), but even if it doesn’t I’m sure we’ll see something from a third-party developer pretty quickly.

4. Video recording. Criminey, it’s not that hard. I don’t want to make feature films with the thing, but once in a while you come across something that you can’t really record with a still photo. Most lesser phones already do this.

5. Video conferencing. The original AT&T Picturephone was a failure, and everyone thought that this was because it cost a fortune and didn’t work very well. Then, early videoconferencing was a failure aside from some specific applications, and everyone thought that this was a failure because it cost a small fortune and required a lot of fiddling to get it to work well. Now, video conferencing is cheap and fairly easy, and people still by and large don’t do it, and the thought is that this is because people don’t like being seen on the screen when they’re talking to someone.

I’m set up to do video conferencing pretty well here at Tino Manor, but I don’t do it all that often because I find that the video does not add much to the whole experience. If I’m talking to someone on the phone, or, better yet, if I’m IMing with them, I can do other things at the same time. When I’m on camera, 100% of my attention has to be devoted to what’s going on there. Once in a while, this might be useful; usually, it’s not.

Video conferencing on a mobile phone, on the other hand, is pretty intriguing. The appeal here isn’t that someone would be able to see me while we’re talking, but that they’d be able to see what’s around me. It’s less video conferencing and more the ability to transmit live video from wherever I happen to be. I think that that would find a lot of takers. And once you have the video recording capability, you get it for free (so to speak) if you have bandwidth enough to fit the video in.

6. Call recording. And sound recording generally. Presumably, you can’t record calls with the iPhone — or with most phones — because doing so is illegal in some places without the consent of both parties. This is ridiculous, but that shouldn’t be too surprising. But: it’s got a microphone; it’s got memory. Why can’t I record ambient sounds, i.e. use it as a memo recorder? No idea. This is another thing that you get essentially for free.

7. Voice-mail archiving. Voice-mail messages on the iPhone are stored as .amr files in the filesystem. If you have a jailbroken phone, you can copy them right off there and play the files with Quicktime Player. Why the hell does iTunes not suck all the VMs off the phone every time you sync it? There doesn’t seem to be any official way to get the messages off there. This is nuts.

8. Memory card slot. Another thing that I don’t think we’re getting. My iPhone has 8 GB of storage, which is the most you could get when I bought it. I’m constantly running up against that limit, because I’ve got a lot of Podcasts on there, and music, and video, and pictures.

Right now, Amazon sells an 8GB SDHC card for $32. There probably isn’t room for an full-sized SD card in the iPhone, but there’s room for an electrically-identical micro-SD card that would allow me to double the capacity of the thing. iPods don’t have expandable storage because there’s a wide range of iPods available: if you need a lot of storage, you can always get a 160 GB model. This isn’t the case with the iPhone, which will probably top out at 32 GB on Monday.

I don’t really need to carry all that much data around with me; the problem is that I don’t want to have to decide which small subset of data I want to carry around. I have no real need for more than 8 GB of data in my pocket (is that a gigabyte in your pocket, or are… ahh, forget it), but I want to invest as nearly as possible zero time in setting up playlists, rules, etc., etc. to fit things into the iPhone.

I suppose the best way to put it is that I want enough headroom to not have to think about this.

9. Better iPod interface. At its introduction, Steve Jobs touted the iPhone as ‘the best iPod we’ve ever made’. This it is not. Say you’re playing a track from a playlist, and you want to hear other songs from that artist, or that album. You can’t jump right to these things; you have to back yourself out to the Album or Artist listing, and then drill back down. There’s no reason for this.

Worse, say you’re listening to a 30-podcast and you want to skip the minute or two of useless front matter and theme music that a lot of people stick on the front of such things. Good luck: the iPhone’s track position slider doesn’t do this very well (the resolution is too low, limited perhaps by the size of your finger). Fast-forwarding by continually pressing on the FF/track-advance button is risky, because if the iPhone thinks that you’ve let go for an instant, it interprets the next instant as a new touch on the button, and advances you to the next track.

It would be nice to see an iPod-style scroll wheel on the screen for things like this, or a more reliable way to immediately speed up the playback of the current track — such as is currently available in Quicktime Player.

10. A better web browser. Mobile Safari is really the first phone-browser worth criticizing, but it still stinks. It’s slow, it purges pages from its memory too readily, it has no way to open links in a new window (which is important because the fact that it’s slow and doesn’t cache well means that there’s a big cost to hitting that ‘back’ button), and it doesn’t do Flash.

Now, I hate Flash. I loathe it. The world would be far better off without it. But you go to war with the web you have, and the simple truth is that there are a lot of people out there who persist in developing their corporate websites with Flash. If you want to find, say, the nearest Burger King, or the ingredients of a Whopper, or anything else along those lines with an iPhone, you are out of luck: the BK website is implemented entirely in Flash. And it’s not the only one.

People have complained about the lack of Flash support from the beginning. The iPhone is, at its heart, a very feeble and ill-equipped computer, and bad Flash movies will sometimes give my old MacBook Pro fits, so I can understand why Apple decided to not support Flash. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter: there are too many idiots out there producing websites that are entirely dependent on Flash to just write it off.

11. Better predictive text. The iPhone keyboard is a marvelous thing. When writing an e-mail, I can just stab away at that thing and usually compose a perfect, typo-free message thanks to the iPhone’s text-prediction and -correction software. The problem is that there’s no way to explicitly add words and phrases to the iPhone’s dictionary.

When I type ‘tino@t’ the next letters are always ‘inotopia.com’. One hundred percent of the time. But as soon as I enter the @, the iPhone recognizes that this is not an ordinary word and it stops attempting to correct what I’m typing. When this happens, you immediately learn just how much of the iPhone keyboard’s usability — like 90% — is due to the software.

There are a whole bunch of things like this that I find myself correcting over and over and over but that the iPhone does not learn. WordPerfect had the idea of user dictionaries in the 1980s; the iPhone should have them now.

12. Password storage. I understand why Apple has the iPhone set to not store passwords; if the thing is stolen, you don’t want the thief to be able to access your bank account. But the nature of the touch-screen keyboard, and the dependence on software correction, means that typing in gibberish or semi-gibberish passwords is very painful. I’m not sure what the best solution for this is, but there needs to be one.

13. Sleep times. I charge my phone up next to my bed, so if someone decides to call me at 6:30 in the morning I don’t have to race downstairs. I assume that anyone calling me at 6:30 a.m. has some kind of emergency on their hands, and needs my help. They had better have.

This means that the last thing I have to do every day is go into the iPhone’s settings app and turn off the ‘new mail’ noise. I filter spam before it makes it to the iPhone, but I’ll still typically get a couple messages overnight. I do not want the phone to attempt to alert me to the existence of these messages while I’m sleeping. There’s no way to tell the iPhone to automatically turn off certain kinds of alerts between (say) 11:30 p.m. and 6:30 a.m.

14. Volume. When I’m not sleeping, the iPhone has to be louder. I take care to put my iPhone in its sleeve-case upside-down, so the tiny speaker is facing out; I then take care to put the whole thing in my pocket so that the speaker is facing up. I have constructed my own ringtone that’s very distinctive and as loud as I can get it. Hearing tests indicate that there’s nothing wrong with my ears. I still miss the ring about 1/3 of the time, and only know the phone is ringing because of the (weak) vibration. If the vibration gets turned off (which happens inadvertently sometimes because I’m constantly screwing with those settings, see #13 above), I typically miss about half of my calls.

15. Bluetooth improvements. Or maybe not Bluetooth, since the iPhone has 802.11 wireless networking. The basic point is that I should not have to plug the phone in to my computer to sync my address book, calendar, etc. Movies and music involve moving a lot of data and can reasonably be a plug-in-only kind of thing; phone-related microdata can easily be updated on a schedule whenever I’m in range.

There is some informed speculation that Apple will be revamping their .Mac service to make it less .Bad, and that the new iPhone may be capable of syncing events, contacts, etc. over the network from anywhere this way. That would be nice.

16. A better camera. The iPhone camera stinks. It doesn’t stink worse than most cell-phone cameras stink, and in certain circumstances it is possible to take a decent picture with the thing.

But even in this reduced and enhanced-by-iPhoto version, the contrast range is lousy, there’s a green cast, and everything looks like it’s photographed through a layer of gauze. The light sensitivity is also terrible, which is a real problem when trying to e.g. take pictures of friends in bars.

Maybe there is a hard limit to the quality of photo one can get out of such a small camera; certainly the optics are going to have to be optimized for size rather than quality. I don’t know much about camera design. One thing that I know would help would be to offer one or both of the volume buttons as a shutter trip when the phone is in camera mode. As it is, you have to press and release a button on the screen to take a picture, which is a real problem. You’ve got to hold the phone facing your subject and then press on the side opposite the lens. There’s a reason that no actual cameras are designed this way; doing this means that you can’t hold the phone solidly, and that you tend to pivot the thing right at the moment of taking the picture. Some of the gauze-filter effect is probably due to this UI-induced tendency to move the camera at the moment of exposure.

I haven’t said anything here about GPS, which a lot of people are eagerly anticipating. I’m not sure that it would be all that useful. GPS tends to use a lot of battery juice, and it takes a while for the receiver to get an initial fix. It doesn’t work if you don’t have a decent view of the sky.

The iPhone’s current where-am-i feature currently gets my location to somewhere within a circle with a radius of about a mile. It would do better if I were not in the boonies right now.

This seems like it’s generally enough, unless you are somewhere where there are no street signs. If you’re somewhere where there are no street signs, you’re probably in the woods or in the air or on the water and should be using a real GPS anyway. Where I most need a GPS in my phone is when I’m in the mall, or at Home Depot, and not only would it not work in either of those places, until the malls, Home Depots, grocery stores, etc. get hooked up with Google to deliver micro-map overlays of their floor plans it wouldn’t be useful anyhow.