About a month ago I broke down and bought an iPhone. Here are a few things that in my opinion need to be fixed or added to the iPhone.

Features that Need Fixing

1. Speaker Phone Volume – This has got to be one of the most annoying things I’ve ever had to deal with on a cell phone. Sometimes I feel like the speaker is louder through my ear piece than my speaker phone. It is absolutely unusable unless you are in an extremely quiet place – we’re talking pin drop here. Unusable while driving even if the windows are closed.
2. Key Board – Currently it’s very clumsy to go back and edit a word that you have already typed. Most text boxes including the To field of an E-mail or the Address Bar of Safari are at the top of the page. You can’t even see where your cursor is in the textbox when trying to go back and correct something. It’s easier to just retype the entire thing. I think this should be fixed by adding Arrows to the keyboard.

Features Request

1. Video Recording – I mean c’mon any $50 camera phone let’s you record video as well as still images, what’s the deal?
2. Audio Recording – I mean c’mon any $25 phone let’s you record audio! What’s the deal?
3. Picture and Video Text Messaging – I can e-mail pictures but I can’t “text” or SMS pictures. Most phones with a camera allow you to do this (Motorola Razr anyone?)
4. E-mail Multiple Photos – If I have a couple photos I’d like to share with a couple friends I need to send a separate e-mail for each photo. It might not sound bad, but it can be really annoying. Over the holidays some family members asked me to e-mail them some of photos I had taken earlier in the day. I had to create a new e-mail for each of the 6 photos and select all 10 names from my contacts list for every email/photo. That’s 60-70 clicks/taps for something that should have been able to be done in 10.
5. Bluetooth Music Server – Allow me to “broadcast” my iPod through Bluetooth to devices like car stereos and other receivers. I’m sick of having to choose whether I get my ears blown out by my FM transmitter because of cell phone interference or to go Air Plane mode and be unable to receive calls in my car (it’s a cell phone damn it, where else would I need to receive calls when I’m not at home).
6. Tilt – Allow me to use the horizontal tilt functionality in more apps including Maps, and especially Mail and SMS. I can type 20 times faster with the bigger horizontal keyboard – at the very least allow the keyboard to be flipped horizontal at any time, even if the underlying app doesn’t change its orientation.
7. Add GPS to Maps – I think this one is a no brainer. While you’re at it, add voice guided directions so I can say Bye Bye to Tom Tom.

So that’s all I could think of for now. Many people may think that things like voice guided directions or the Bluetooth music server wouldn’t be possible, but in fact they should be quite simple for Apple to do. The OS is based off of OSX which already includes support for voices. The device does support Bluetooth so I don’t understand why it would be hard to make the iPod work with it. As for audio and video recording there are already people (outside of Apple) who have made applications that perform these functions on jail broken phones.

I’m hoping by February we’ll see alot of these features from Apple, if not, they’ll be giving us developers the SDK for the iPhone so we’ll be able to write them ourselves. First person to write a Speaker Phone Volume Booster gets $100 from me via PayPal 😉