What’s missing from the iPhone?
The iPhone really is a phenomenal leap as far as mobile phone usability is concerned, but it’s far from perfect. Here’s a few ways it can be improved:
Remote Control Functionality and AppleTV Integration
Although the AppleTV is a great product, the only way to currently control it is through the no-frills mac remote. This is particularly bad in buildings that more than one Mac calls home, where you’ll come across multiple remotes, but only one will control your AppleTV
Apple should include an option to control AppleTV from iPhones on the same network. Apple should extend this great protocol they support, zeroconf, that allows you to browse your network of Macs through the finder, to allow for the pairing of iPhones, AppleTVs and perhaps, even Macs themselves
It would work a bit like this: on the iPhone, a “Remote Control” will be added. Tapping on this should take you to a list of found devices; devices you’ve paired before should appear at the top of the list; other devices at the bottom, should have a Setup button. Tapping on this should send a signal to AppleTV that this phone wants to pair with it; to this end, AppleTV will show a screen with a 4-digit PIN (if it’s in the middle of playing something, it should just project the number on the bottom.) On the iPhone, you have two options: Enter the number you see on the screen, or hide the device entry from the Remote Control Devices List.
Once you’ve set this up, you should be able to control the AppleTV in the exact same way you control the iPod functionality of the iPhone, including browsing the music in coverflow
Remote Control for the Mac should work in the same way, but I see room for an extra feature: Using the iPhone as a high-end Keynote controller, where not only can you switch between slides by dragging your finger across the phone, but also allow for selecting a specific slide in cover flow.
How presentation with coverflow might look (slides: Dr. Jason Eisner)
Filesystem
This is one of the rumored upgrades, but the iPhone really should support being mounted as a filesystem, especially over WiFi. Of course, this can get hairy with account maintainance, so I think Apple should use the same kind of the Pairing they’d use with Remote Control. In fact, mounting the iPod as a remote should also give you the option of mounting it as a storage medium (another checkbox on the Remote Control coupling screen.)
Games
The iPhone would make a great gaming device. Recently Games were introduced for the iPod - I don’t know how well they’re doing, but I understand they’re designed for the iPod interface, and they use a clickwheel as a controller. It’s going to take some work to convert these to be iPhone friendly, but the iPhone is a much better platform for games than either the iPod or any other phone out there
The most promising new developments are the tapping and tilting inputs. Tapping, dragging and dropping should make games like Solitaire or Whack-a-mole work extremely well, and requires little elaboration on my part. Tilting would be great for any game where you’re controlling the motion of a certain central piece. For example in Tetris, tilting the phone to the left and to the right makes the piece move to the left or right; tilting it downwards makes the piece drop faster. I’m using simple examples, but as the Wii has shown, the sky is the limit.
iTunes on the go and Ringtones
The iPhone should be able to sync directly with the iTunes Store. I’m sure it will be slow and painful, so perhaps it should be allowed only on wifi for now, until the iPhone 2G comes along with GSM-3G. The iPhone would really be a great vehicle for iTunes Store purchases. Consider for example the mobile phone ringtone business. By some estimates, this will be a 4 billion dollar business by 2008, and most of these are clipped songs. Consider Apple’s competitive advantage: what the ringtone business sells is 15 second clips for as much as a dollar; Apple sells full songs at roughly the same price.
The fixes and small little features that everyone wants
It seems like development was rushed a bit in order to get it out on its pre-announced launch date. Now that thats in the past, Apple has work to do. They have to fix a buggy safari browser that crashes from time to time, an iPod functionality that sometimes stops playing while you’re doing something else, and a VPN function I can’t get to work. Personally I wouldn’t mind having some sort of copy-paste functionality either
But the most annoying non-feature of the iPhone right now is the AT&T lockup. I’d much rather use a local sim card when I travel, and the iPhone should allow me to do so.
What other features would you like to see on the iPhone? Post a comment below.