iPhone thoughts

Here are a few of my thoughts on the iPhone after using one for several days. I picked up two of them when they were released.

Nice things I like about iPhone:

• Activation is currently the best in the industry. Buy your phone and go home to activate with iTunes. This is similar to the way the pay as you go phones work, without the iTunes part though. I hope the rest of the industry can do this and get rid of the clerk having to waste time to activate the phones in the store at traditional cellular phone outlets.
• The microphone button on the new headset is nice and should be added to the other iPods for pause/play/next track functionality.
• Wide screen video iPod is nice. I like watching movies and video podcasts on the device.
• Access to my home email from anywhere is fun.

Things that should be updated in the next firmware:

• Add ring tone selection from my existing iTunes library. Any MP3 in my library should be able to be used for a few second clip of ring tone.
• List all email accounts in iTunes for syncing. I don't know why my one Exchange account wasn't listed for syncing. It didn't make any sense.
• Enable a junk mail filter similar to Mail.app. Better yet, import my Mail.app junk mail filter and use it.
• Enable text mail only mode. I don't need everything to be rich text or HTML email.
• Disable the automatic download of linked content in email similar to the Mail.app. Put in a button to load images if I really want to load them. It is only a matter of time for someone to come up with a simple email verification spam that tracks based on the image download requests back to a spam server. I'd rather not verify my email address in this way.
• Put To Do lists in as either a separate app or part of Calendar like iCal.
• Add in a way to select text. I use the select all (command-A) function pretty often. I also want to select just a subset of the text with either my finger or the keyboard (like with the shift key held down).
• Add in the ability to copy and paste. Who was the rocket scientist that took out the copy and paste? Copy for an email to paste into another one anyone? Or copy from a web site to paste into email. This is pretty basic to be removed.
• Add in the ability to download content from a website. In Safari I like the ability to be able to right click to open content onto another page. Also you can download images and other files with a simple right click. There needs to be a way to do this from the iPhone Safari.
• Add iChat capability instead of SMS or in addition. I want AIM, Yahoo, MSN, and other chat clients to be able to be used.
• Add back in USB disk mode. All the other iPods can be used in a disk mode, you should be able to do this with this iPod as well. It would also make the downloading of content from a website easier to get to the host computer.
• Release the darn SDK for developers. There are so many widgets I'd like to see on this phone.

I'm sure there are more things that could be added but overall it is still a decent experience to use an iPhone.