iPhone 3.2 Wishes (Updated)

Before I had an iPhone, I had just your average flip phone, didn’t care if it had a web browser on it or if it did anything else besides just have a decent battery life. This summer I finally took the plunge and bought my first Apple product ever, the iPhone 3GS. I had been waiting for some time for them to come out with a version with more storage before I even considered getting one and 32GB was just good enough for me (64Gb would have really been the sweet spot). So far I’ve been pretty happy with the phone , not counting all the AT&T issues.

As I’ve come to realize with Apple products, they always seem to leave out the most obvious of features to people and dictate to the user what their experience and usage of their products should be. A couple quick examples off the top of my head, you cannot turn off the monitor on the iMac, iTunes doesn’t support the ability to monitor your mp3 folder for changes in the library (iTunes 9.0 did a weak attempt of supporting this by adding a folder you can drag things into).

Apple does seem to be listening…. a bit, to their users with the iPhone as everyone is so vocal about them and it’s one of the most widely used phones out there. I remember in the past if I had any issue with my flip phones there would almost certainly never be any firmware release to fix the issue and the product would be abandoned all together by the company within a year. Calling support about the issues was pointless, they would just try sending you a replacement phone or just file a bug report that never got corrected unless there were enough people using the phone to complain about the same issue (there never was). I just accepted that as the norm if you were not using the most popular phone out on the market at the time. Then I got an iPhone and all of a sudden I started caring about my phone working perfectly. All those little nuisances suddenly needed to be fixed dammit, I paid a lot for this phone!  A few things still remain that I’d love to see get fixed/added as an option in 3.2…

• Timestamps on all text messages sent and received.  Currently you only get a time stamp on a message if it’s the first message that’s been sent after 15(or some other time) minutes of inactivity.  The data is definitely there, but they are choosing not to display it for whatever reason.  Makes them look sleeker? F that, just give users an option to turn them on and off.  Friends text me all the time saying “I’m on my way” and I always used to use that to judge how long its been since I’ve heard from them.
• A global option to turn off auto-rotate.  A couple of apps have this built in currently, mainly e-book readers.  I, like many other people, use their iPhone in bed, or laying on the couch and end up turning on our sides only to have the current item we are reading rotate along with us.  I then end up trying to play a game with the phone on how I can move it slow enough not to trigger a rotation and still be able to read what I wanted to while laying on my side.
• Video and Podcast titles are cut off that are too long.  If you download any podcast or video with a title more than 11 characters long, it is truncated on the listing.  Guess what?  Every single video and podcast I’ve come across has a title longer than that.  The first few words in every video and podcast title appear to rarely have any information relevant to the episode you are wanting to watch.  I can never find particular episodes of videos or podcasts because of this, unless I happen to know the date of the item.  Please just give us some sort of way to scroll horizontal in the title box to see the rest of the title.
• An accurate signal strength indicator.  I’m not sure if this falls in AT&T’s lap or not, but my phone seems to have either 2 states, full bars or no bars, and there are countless times when I have full bars that I can’t make a phone call, send a text or get any data service, but the indicator does not change.
• Ok this one is a stretch but…. The weather icon always says 73 and sunny and I’m constantly fooled into thinking that’s the actual weather outside.  It seems like the iPhone supports dynamically changing the app icons as it can add a progress meter during an install and an unread message counter for apps with inboxes/notifications.  It would be nice if the weather icon could dynamically change instead of mocking me all the time.
• Edit 12/09/2009: Would like to see the ability to snooze Calendar events that go off, and also have them accumulate with a count on the calendar icon for unread events that have gone off.
• Ability to select “Emergency” contacts on your phone to call if phone is locked.  I lock my iPhone and in the event of an emergency or if I lose my iPhone and some good samaritan happens to stumble upon on it, I’d like the ability to choose a few emergency contacts that can be displayed without having to unlock the phone that can be contacted in an emergency or to return my phone.