The iPhone is an excellent device, quite possibly the best smart phone out there. However, there’s no doubt that there are quite a few improvements that Apple should make to the most recent firmware update. The following 15 items are minor software tweaks that we thought of that would make the iPhone a much better device. In other words, it’s things we’d like to see in a future iPhone firmware upgrade. What would you want in an iPhone?
PS: Good thing we waited until after the iPhone 3.0 release to write this article, other wise the 15 item list would’ve been a 150 item list. The 3.0 firmware really did do a great job. Also, a lot of the items on this list are available for jailbreakers. If you haven’t jailbroken your iPhone yet, follow this guide.
1. All Notifications in one place
Let’s say you’re in a rush, and don’t have time to check your missed calls, text messages, voicemails, emails, and push notifications all separately. In reality, it can take a few minutes (without even having to listen to long voicemails, that is). Now imagine you have a screen, perhaps one page to the left of Spotlight Search, that has only your newest notifications, listed in chronological order. Just go to that page and read down the list. If you want an item to be marked as “read” or “viewed”, simply tap it. If you want to see the email, for example, in full in the “Mail” app, simply double tap. I’m amazed that this doesn’t exist yet.
2. Turn Off Accelerometer
Have you ever tried reading on your iPhone in bed? It’s no easy task, especially when you’re laying sideways. Or how about reading on your iPhone while walking around? Whatever rotational motion you make, the screen begins to rotate into landscape mode. Sure, being able to toggle between portrait and landscape is great, but sometimes it’s just plain annoying. We should be able to turn the accelerometer off.
If you jailbreak your iPhone, you can get the ability to toggle the accelerometer on and off. Go here to learn more about it (it’s number 5).
3. Turn Off Shake To Undo
One of iPhone 3.0′s new hidden little features is “shake to undo”, which allows you to shake the phone around in order to undo what you typed (shake again to redo the typing). However, sometimes when you’re typing and you accidentally shake the phone (or if you’re in a train) then the shake to undo feature is simply an annoyance, rather than a helpful feature. There should be a setting to turn off shake to undo if you know you’re about to have a shaky time.
4. Add Numbers on Top of Keyboard
There’s no reason that the numbers and letters on the iPhone keyboard need to be split onto two seperate keyboards. To transfer from letters to numbers you’ve gotta press “123″ and then “ABC” to get back. It’s irritating and slows down typing. There should be a 5th row of keys on the standard QWERTY keyboard that adds a row of numbers, (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0), to the top of the keyboard – just like on your computer.
If you jailbreak your iPhone, you can get the ability to add a 5th row of keys. Go here to learn more about it (it’s number 6).
5. Folder to organize apps
I have a huge amount of apps. I would love to be able to organize them into folders such as “Games”, “Music”, “Business”, “Utilities”, “Junk”, etc. Apple could even go as far as to automatically place apps in categories (if you want it to, based on your settings) according to the “Category” that it’s listed under in iTunes. Perhaps instead of folders, Apple could make a page system, in which each page is dedicated to a category. So when you download a game, it goes to the game page(s), and when you download a utility it goes to the utility page(s).
If you jailbreak your iPhone, you can organize your apps into folders with “Categories”. Find out more here.
6. Download files right from the web
I’m talking MP3s, video files, documents…whatever you want. Why not? It’s possible, because there’s a jailbroken app that allows you to download things directly from Mobile Safari. Now, just because I’m saying you should be able to download stuff, doesn’t mean everything file type should be supported and functional (obviously). But there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be able to download files on your iPhone, store them, and transfer them to your computer via USB.
7. Easier “On/Off” Feature Toggling
Sometimes, you just wanna turn WiFi off. However, you’ve gotta go to Settings and hit several different buttons before you’re finally able to turn off the feature. There should be an easier way to toggle common features on and off. For example, you should be able to preform some kind of tactile motion (like dragging down from the top of the screen) to get a quick pop-up menu with on/off toggles.
If this sounds familiar to you, then you’ve probably tried SB Settings on a jailbroken iPhone. The jailbroken app allows you to do exactly what was described above. The question is – why doesn’t Apple?
8. Take pic by pressing anywhere
Ever try taking a picture of yourself on your iPhone? If you said no, you’re lying. It’s tough trying to position your finger just right so you can tap the small “take picture” button. While you’re using the camera, the whole screen (with the image on it) isn’t doing anything, so why not activate the whole screen as a take photo button? If Apple is worried that people will accidentally tap the screen, resulting in an annoying photo taking experience, then make it so you’ve gotta press anywhere with two fingers.
If you’re dying for this feature, then check out Snapture.
9. Store any webpage for offline viewing
You’ve got lots of gigs on this thing. Save some space so that you can save whatever site you’d like for unlimited offline viewing. You might be thinking, “But why…the iPhone has internet everywhere?” Ha. That’s funny. Try to use the iPhone for mobile browsing everywhere and you’ll quickly understand why everyone hates AT&T. The 3G network is not full proof. So if there’s some blog post or news article you’re dying to finish later, Apple should allow you to save it for offline viewing.
10. Customizable Icons
Everyone in the jailbreaking iPhone community has been customizing their iPhone for years. Why not Apple? Why do we have to keep the specific icons for the native apps? We should be able to set up a custom theme…even though it doesn’t really matter, everyone loves customizing – it’s fun. There should be a way to either set up an overall theme (maybe something like Winterboard), or a way to individually change an icon that you don’t like (such as Weather, Clock, Maps, etc…).
If you’re dying to customize your iPhone, jailbreak your phone and look for Winterboard.
11. Multiple Settings Profiles (Home, Work, Weekend)
Let’s say there’s a certain way you have your iPhone set up during the work week, and another way you have your iPhone set up in the evenings at home, and a third way you like it on the weekends. Instead of having to manually go in and change things around, you should be able to go in, define “Profiles” with specific settings, name them, save, and be done. Now when you want Home settings, just choose Home, instead of having to go in and manually changing fetch data times, and stuff like that.
12. Auto Speaker for Visual Voicemail
It’s not a big deal, but when you go into Visual Voicemail and start playing a message, it starts playing through the ear piece. It’s as if Apple wants you to hold the phone to your ear before pressing the button. Sure, there’s a “Speaker” button at the top, but you’ve gotta hurry up and press it before you miss something important. The voicemails should play through speaker autmoatically, and through the ear piece only if you turn the speaker off (essentially the opposite of how it is set up now).
13. Smiley faces
Look, call me a dork, but smiley faces are great for chat and SMS. Sometimes it can fill the space when you just don’t really have anything to say. The iPhone can definitely handle SMSing smiley faces and icons. So, why not Apple? Smiley faces should come stock in the next firmware update.
If you want smiley faces and icons now, then go here (number 4) to see how you can add Emoji Icons to your iPhone for free without jailbreaking.
14. Hide icons
Some people are neat freaks. Some people just like all the customization in the world. So that’s why Apple should add a feature that allows us to hide various icons, without actually deleting the app. If you have a jailbroken iPhone, then you probably have Boss Prefs. Boss Prefs is one of the most popular jailbroken iPhone applications that allows you to hide various app icons (even the iPhone native ones).
15. More info on lock screen
When your iPhone is locked, you can see the time and the date. You can also see if you got a text message, who the sender is (unless there are more than one), if you got a missed call, and who it was from. However, there’s lots of little pieces of information that Apple could conveniently display on your lock screen. For example, the temperature, new emails, the actual text of an SMS, and more. There should be a settings menu that allows you to edit what you want on your lock screen, Apple even has a patent for this.
If your iPhone is jailbroken, then check out IntelliScreen.
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Two other things would be perfect for this list, but they are both so commonly complained about that it wouldn’t be fair to include them. I’m talking about Flash Support and Background Applications. Flash support is highly desired by many iPhoners. Sure, YouTube is great, but it just ain’t enough. Imagine if the only source of video on your computer was YouTube. It would be horrible. YouTube is awesome for user generated videos, but really, how many user generated videos can you watch? When you’re looking for a TV show or a movie, YouTube just isn’t gonna do it. You need some other sites (I’m sure you know plenty) to get quality video content – and a lot of them use Flash. And how about all the sites you can’t view because your iPhone doesn’t support Flash?
Being able to run background applications would be absolutely phenomenal. Imagine being able to go from an app, to your email, to another app, and back to the original app without any of the apps turning off? It would be great. The problem, of course, is the resulting slow iPhone and poor battery life.
All that being said, let’s get to the important thing: What do you want to see in a future iPhone upgrade? Let us know in the comments.
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Great Tips, very useful.. this reminds me to turn off accelerometer when using the iphone in bed.
Customized text message alerts!!! Something so simple and basic!
The ability to change your color sceme for Text Messages. I do not like the green and gray AT ALL!
The ability to play music on Pandora (or other similar apps) while doing other things (like you can do with iPod).
Those are my top requests. There’s more but I can’t think of them right now.
Some improvement are nice to have but some suggestions here are extremely important.
Must have: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 14.
I agree with all except the following with comments:
3. Not that I disagree but how else to “undo”?
5. If not or not yet, at least allow us to move non-displayed app (by search only) to the display screen and vise versa.
6. You don’t need jailbreak phone. I believe there are apps allow you to do so but not seamless.
8. Click iPhone screen while using camera will change the focus point, isn’t?
9. There are apps to provide this feature too.
12. It should be customizable, not automatically. I personally prefer not to use speaker. Privacy reason.
13. There is a free workaround but should make it as standard.
Playing music is one thing. Running background app is another. I used seveal generations of Blackberry device. It constantly hault to run backgroun apps. Can’t do the important things that I need to right at that moment.
Until Apple can perfect the multitasking, like use the muliti-core CPU etc, I rather run one app at a time.
i just want a snooze bezel on ical reminders. you can do it on the computer, why not the phone?
I would like to see “power options”. For example, I can choose a power setting that would turn on wifi, bluetooth, gps etc when I have my iphone plugged into power & turn it all off when I’m running on battery.
#4, #5 and #7 need to come out soon. The phone is a joke without these. Especially #4 – numbers are so commonly used that having to move to a separate keyboard is a nightmare. (Think complex passwords like yT3h8pm6a).
#1 and #2 would be my next choices. Followed by #14 (dammit, I want the built-in weather app GONE, same with Stocks), #12 and #8.
Absolutely not: 13. Don’t you dare put in emoticons, or damn well make them optional.
You forgot one.
The fix I would like most: The ability to adjust the cache settings for safari mobile. I hate that it takes as long to reload a page I just visited as it does to load the page from scratch.
A big missing component is the inability to set custom alerts in Calendar like in iCal. 2 Days is not sufficient.
JB phones have Notifier, which partially addresses #1. (It wont do general push notifications in 3.0, but will do emails, voicemails, missed calls, SMS, MMS, and IM.
Re #11, I’d like the notion of timed profiles like some feature phones have (had this on my Treo). So you could have office for work hours on weekdays, home for off hours, etc. I’d also like to include things like call forwarding in a profile (I forward my calls to my work-provided BB during working hours.)
These are all great, but I think that for those of us who love the accelerometer and being able to go landscape so easily, along with the option to turn it off we should have the option to allow our home screen(s) to go landscape as well for easy switching between apps we like to use in that mode.
YES,YES,YES,YES!!!!!!!
You mentioned the need to run apps in the background, but failed to mention that backgrounder is available for jailbroken phone. Backgrounder + fring = IM bliss … backgrounder + pandora = music paradise
If you would buy a Windows Mobile phone…YOU COULD DO ALL OF THAT. Buying a phone that has to be “Jail Broken” is quite possibly one the dumbest things I have ever heard of. The only reason you settle for a substandard phone because it it’s from Apple.
This annoys me as well. With 3.0 a good work around is now available. Just hold your finger on a link and then click “open in a new page”. This way you don’t have to hit the back key, just close the new page and the original is still there and you don’t need to wait to reload it.
Troll
Dude, if you jailbreak your phone, you can get pretty much everything on your list free from the Cydia app store or instalious repositories.
RT
http://www.anonymize.us.tc
11.
There is a paid for jailbroken app called ErProfile that lets you create ringtone profiles. Never used it, so not sure how well it works.
I think that number 12 could or could not be a good thing… i think that apple has it so it goes to earpeice for security reasons. but, its a two way street. btw loved the article
Here’s another one. I don’t know if this applies to the original and 3G phone but when I got my 3GS and took a few photos I saw that when I viewed them on the phone and zoomed into them to verify focus they seemed soft. I actually thought something was wrong with the camera feature. Only when I transferred them to the computer did I see they were in fact sharp (well, most of them LOL).
Eventually I figured it out: Naturally the original 2048 x 1536 pixel image is downscaled to 480 x 320 to show on the iPhone’s screen. What is unusual is that unlike any digital camera I’ve experienced when you zoom in on the display you are zooming into the downscaled data, not the full scale image so of course it looks soft. It should just crop and resize from the original data, not the reduced one. You should be able to zoom in quite a bit at full sharpness all the way until there is a 1:1 pixel relationship and only zooming beyond that should make it look sharp.
I hope this is changed on some future software update.
Really good set of features.. Actually, I did feel the need for some of these features myself while using the phone… One of them was the keyboard displayed on the screen. While typing in an email address into a field, you will need to shift between the keyboards at least two time… Which makes the whole process a bit tedious…
Good stuff..
Two things I would like to see would be a Downloads folder of some sort that could sync with your computer ( number of files that could be stored would depend of free space available on your iphone) and a mobile version of Preview like is in OS X.
Finally add support for .ics calendar attachments to the email client.
Here’s something I’d like to see. You know how when you’re looking at your list of contacts, it has that vertical alphabet on the right hand side, so for instance you can tap “S” to auto-scroll down to the entries under “S”? Why don’t they have this same feature in the iPod app on the iPhone?
Here’s why I think this would come in handy: I’ve got several playlists that have hundreds, sometimes thousands of songs in them, all kept in order by artist name. So why can’t I have that same vertical alphabet to choose a letter from as opposed to having to scroll down for over a minute to find the song I want to hear?
This seems like an easy enough feature to implement, so how bout it Apple? You’re good at streamlining things and making them easier. This seems like a given to me.
I agree with most of these, especially the multiple profile settings.
Also, I’d really like to be able to set different e-mail signatures for different accounts, to differentiate between work and personal signatures. I mean, c’mon, it’s pretty obvious. If you have multiple e-mail accounts, what are the odds that one signature fits all?
Regarding number 6 (Download files right from the web), a big yes! I also want a common documents folder – one central storage location for documents/files, accessible by all apps as well as from your computer via USB, WiFi and Bluetooth, instead of each app having its own dedicated space isolated from other apps’ documents. I want to be able to download a PDF in Safari and open it in PDF Expert, or download an e-mail attachment in Mail and unzip it and upload to FTP in iStorage. Currently, if I need a file accessible in several apps, I need to store multiple copies of the file, one in each apps’ dedicated space.
Finally, better Bluetooth support. I want to be able to hook up a bluetooth keyboard, and send and recieve files and contacts etc. via Bluetooth between other phones or computers.
http://www.htc.com
Need I say more…
The home screen is a very needed feature for business users.
“6. Download files right from the web”
You say there’s a JB app for this but don’t say what it is… Can you point me to it? Thanks!
#5 definitely gets my vote.
How about a character count when composing an SMS? I’d even settle for some, ANY kind of indication that you’ve reached the 160 character limit and have started on a second message…
Enable/disable wifi,3g,bluetooth etc via voice control would be awesome
Troll
How about being able to directly access mailboxes from the home screen, it is rather annoying to keep hitting back back back, mailbox, inbox, message, every time you want to get to a different mail account.
I think some basic things like being able to delete music and videos from your iPhones “ipod” app is essential, its such a pain having to hook it up to a computer just to erase a trailer that you only wanted to watch once or remove some songs which you don’t like. I’ve had a 3GS since day one and its the first iPhone I’ve owned but the lack of control over media is such a pain. In general I’m really loving the iPhone OS, its just great to use and the 3GS is a really impressive phone, but I hope Apple addresses these issues.
@Kurt if you said Symbian or Android I might have agreed with you, Symbian while it looks a bit fugly is the fastest most stable OS I’ve ever used, when Nokia go back to making powerful quality devices I might go back but I’m sticking with Apple for now. Windows Mobile is the worst OS you can have on a phone, just horrible, buggy, I remember giving back my old Omnia last year after 2 weeks (not the new super Symbian powered Omnia HD, but the crappy Windows mobile version from last year)
I can’t believe this doesn’t already exist (especially considering the precious battey life) ENERGY SAVER PREFERENCES. Just like those found in OS X (which is kind of what #11 suggests).
Where users can quickly scroll through custom settings for times when you need all systems go or when you need to ensure as much juice as possible. A no-brainer that I’m surprised is still MIA.
It’s my single biggest feature request.
This must be written by someone who supports the Apple hegemony. The most obvious thing wrong with the iPhone is Apple’s maniacal anticonsumerism and nobbling. These products are merely shopping carts for its iTunes empire. They even expect you to fork out for a new one when the battery dies.
Here’s my top five wishes:
1. Drag and drop interface for file management. Like its competitors.
2. DIVX/XVID support. It’s the standard, folks.
3. Memory card slot.
4. User replaceable battery. Nice to carry a spare, huh?
5. Multitasking.
Oh and this business of only being able to manage your iPhone/iPod from one computer otherwise it wants to delete everything, please someone just smack Steve Jobs in the head. That’s the best way to fix that. What a f-wit.
The shake thing is definitely annoying. Great article. Makes me wanna jailbreak!
u dont have to turn of accelerometer when u r in bed. when in landscape, position the iphone in a way that the home button is on top. the screen stays the same
Alarm clock with iPod library access would ne great.
okay, i’ve been wanting this so BAD:
let’s say your browsing online, or playing a game, anything with a window open, you get a text notification, open it up, reply to it then have to re-open the app or safari. I think there should be a little x button on the message screen that will direct you to whichever screen you left off!! I really cant believe they haven’t though of this…
and…
the ability to lock different features that you might wanna keep private, lets say your friends or family wanna look at your phone or play a game (very common) but you’d rather them not have access to your texts or emails or maybe even your web browser, there should be a feature where you can choose diff features to lock with a passcode that you enter each time you go there. Of course with the ability to turn this feature off as it’d be annoying to some. All the same master passcode of course.
other then that i mostly want the lock screen with more features.
Just figured in out!…create a ‘ring tone’ in itunes but reduce the volume to low (right click, get info, options, volume adjustment) – then transfer this to iphone (details on creating a ring tone: . Done!
how about the ability to turn the alarm clock volume down, without affecting the ring? I know there are apps out there that does it, but i would rather not use an ‘app’ – i.e. wouldn’t remember to go into it.
You can use a ringtone as an alarm though..
Please don’t forget a better email client. Having moved from a Blackberry where I could read all of my multiple email accounts in one place, the iPhone is a big step back. Also, there need to be options to “Mark All as Read” — so I don’t have to skim through 9000 emails I already read on my computer to drop the count of unread messages. The email client is severely lacking on the iPhone. If they can’t do it themselves, then drop the fetters and let the developer community take a crack at building some apps to fix this!
While typing, if you press the “123″ button and hold it down, the number keyboard comes up and you can drag your finger to the number that you want, let go and it types the number and automatically switches back to the letter keyboard.
How about deleting a call from your history… I dont always want my husband to see whom I call. Id like to do this without deleting the whole call list where its obvious.
Thank you! What a great tip.
Orc
Android has most of this…