My hopes for the iPhone SDK: Nine things they didn't address

In an earlier post, Ten things I hope the new iPhone SDK will help my iPhone do, I identified several items I was hoping that the iPhone SDK would either resolve or address. I can say with confidence, that Apple will address one of the items from my list.

The one item that Apple positively addressed was the Typeahead Search for Dialing option. Now, a user will be able to type to search through a list of contacts instead being required to "flick" through the list.

The other items on my list may be a bit more specialized and, therefore, not addressed. But the two which stand out most in my mind as items which might be slipped into the next release of the iPhone OS are Copy and Paste and Lock.

It is possible that the Copy and Paste functionality will be included in the new software for the iPhone and just not be publicized. To announce it would be an admission that the phone was lacking a vital component.

We have seen Steve Jobs gloss over new/missing features in a product before, specifically with the Apple mouse. A computer only needs one mouse, right? Well, when the Apple Mighty Mouse was introduced, there was still only one button. However, you could change a preference setting and take advantage of several conveniently placed sensors to make your Mighty Mouse mimic two-button mouse behavior from -- get this -- a mouse with only one button.

Until the iPhone update comes out July 11th, I will hold out hope that I will be able to copy and paste. And, who knows, maybe a few of the other things I hoped for will show up too.

Ten things I hope the new iPhone SDK will help my iPhone do

I love my iPhone, but there are a few things it doesn't do. Some of the things it doesn't do seem a bit odd, especially when you compare them to how powerful the phone is.

With the upcoming release of the Software Development Kit (SDK), it stands to reason that Apple will soon add some functionality to the much vaunted iPhone. And, if everything works out just right, my list will become totally obsolete when the SDK is released later this month.

I would like my iPhone to either have or be able to each of the following:

1. Copy and Paste. If you want an easy way to grab information from the web and email it to someone, there just isn't a way to do that on the iPhone without cracking it.
2. Lock Screen Status Icons. I will caveat this item by saying that when the iPhone is locked there are some status icons, but there isn't a status icon for each application that can notify you. For example, if you receive email messages, there isn't an unread message count on the lock screen. Likewise, there isn't an icon indicator for new voicemail messages.
3. Typeahead Search for Dialing. It has always struck me as odd that you can draft a new email message and type to find a name in your contacts, but you cannot do the same when dialing a phone number. To dial a contact, you are limited to flicking through a long list. This is not an easy task when you have over 800 contacts.
4. Customizable AutoCorrect Dictionary. I would love to have the ability to edit the list of AutoCorrect words that my iPhone suggests to me.
5. Suppress the display of remote images. With standard email clients, you can control whether images which reside on remote servers are displayed. Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail all allow you to block external images. Even Apple's Mail.app allows you to enable a similar setting.
6. Support Alternate Keyboard Layouts. I will start out by saying that the iPhone does support keyboard layouts for other languages, like Azerty for French, or Qwertz for German. However, I would love to be able to substitute the Dvorak keyboard layout for Qwerty, which is default on the US iPhone.
7. Better Support for Smart Playlists. Because my iPhone only has 8GB of space, I use Smart Playlists extensively to automatically manage the content (mainly podcasts) on my iPhone. Each of my Smart Playlists is set for "live updating" has the line "Playcount is 0" in it to ensure that I only have not-yet-listened-to podcasts cued up. Many times, however, the playlists don't update until a subsequent sync.
8. Better Support for iMap Email Syncing. My iPhone handles pop mail OK, but it fails to update my iMap accounts even though my option is set to update every 15 minutes. In fact, unless I specifically click the mail icon, it doesn't update at all.
9. Lock icon. An icon that, when clicked, locks and password protects the iPhone immediately.
10. Bluetooth Internet Connection Sharing. The iPhone runs OS X, right? So, an available option is OS X is the ability to share an internet connection to another device. I would love for this option to be made available on the iPhone. I mean, it's OS X, right?

There are many other things I want my iPhone to have, such as a chat client and an ebook reader. Of course, with the SDK right around the corner it shouldn't take long for these two items to get created. In fact, I'd be very surprised if they weren't already in development.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on all this.

Apple iTalk

I was talking with a friend about all the current postulations surrounding the upcoming "next-gen" iPhone and I was reminded that just a little over 18 months ago, all the popular media outlets were abuzz with rumors of Apple announcing a phone and a wide-screen iPod.

So here we are again waiting, this time for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference where rumors range from a 3G iPhone to mysterious new "electric computers."

Do you remember the iTalk, which landed on YouTube in 2006? I remember watching this and thinking, "Yeah, I'd buy one of those."

You know, if Apple releases one of these on Monday, I still think I'd buy one.

Whether you subscribe to all the Apple product hype or not, there's no denying that the iPhone has totally changed what people expect from their cell phones.

What do you think?

UPDATE: CrunchGear has photos of the "new" iPhone. Or do they??