Your Top iPhone 3.0 Wish List. Will Apple Deliver?
by Yves Neidlinger on 14/03/09 at 9:41 pm
Yves Neidlinger is a technologist and a social media and marketing consultant. He is the National Channel Manager for Navara and the founder and Editor in Chief of iPhoneCTO.
The excitement on the interwebs is palpable. Tuesday, Apple is unveiling iPhone OS and SDK 3.0. Tuesday will either make a lot of people happy or infuriate the masses if Apple doesn’t include hotly requested features such as Cut & Paste and MMS.
At last count, over 14 million iPhones have been sold and we are sure each of those 14 million users have their own ideas of what they would like to see Apple include in the next iPhone OS update. We decided to poll our followers on Twitter, @iPhoneCTO, to see what people were hoping would be announced Tuesday.
As I started writing this article, PC World published a story taking a look at the 10 most requested features. Still here? Below is a sampling of what you told us:
@bmirabito – I’d love to see .ics vcalendar support to better coordinate meeting schedules.
@bkwalker – I am looking for whatever will convince my IT/helpdesk to support it 
@dktom – Voice dialing, Copy/Paste, and muliti-threading (more than one app at a time).
@rmp135 – Ability to toggle WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth, etc.. from any application.
@publicfarley – Copy/Paste, Video Recording, Spotlight, Bluetooth file transfer, Background processing.
@robpickering – Copy/Paste, MMS, Bluetooth tethering, background processing, application organizer by category.
@race_addict – Copy/Paste is an absolute must. Turn-by-turn in the maps app would be useful too.
@machaves – Biggest issue is the App Store. Having to deploy apps one at a time is an IT nightmare.
In past articles, CIO’s say “No iPhone for you” and Why iPhone isn’t enterprise ready, we covered a number of iPhone’s glaring shortcomings when it comes to business/enterprise adoption. At the top of the list is the keyboard. While, we don’t expect to see an iPhone with a physical keyboard, we hope Apple will announce support for the horizontal keyboard in all iPhone applications. Currently, it is only available in Mobile Safari, but it is most needed in the email app. This would make typing on iPhone less frustrating and narrow the advantage BlackBerry has over iPhone.
We agree with @machaves that mass deployment of iPhone apps is a major gap that has yet to be addressed. How do you efficiently deploy apps to hundreds and potentially thousands of users? And add our voice to the chorus, we too want to see cut & paste and a spotlight type search function.
While not a software feature we are looking forward to seeing if the rumors of a premium App Store are true. Not only could it serve as a way for leading developers like EA to charge $20 for apps such as Need for Speed which we suspect has been held back, but it could provide enterprise and business software developers opportunities to increase their visibility.
Check back with iPhoneCTO after Tuesday’s announcement. We are planning an editor’s roundtable to discuss iPhone OS 3.0 and what it means to iPhone in the business/enterprise space.
