Features I Wish My iPhone Had

I love my iPhone. I really do. I just wish it had a few more features, like:

1. A “jog dial” like the old iPods.

Christopher Fahey sums this up nicely at graphpaper.com. Not that this is a democracy in any way, but consider this another vote.

2. The ability to stream to an Airport Express.

I have an Airport Express connected to my stereo. It’d be cool if I could stream to it wirelessly. Cables are so 1833.

3. The same iPod forward/pause/back controls in any orientation.

When I walk I often carry my iPhone horizontally in my hand (it switches to Cover Flow mode). I hate having to hold it vertically while I’m walking just to skip a song in a shuffle. That’s like walking and chewing gum for me, and it’s just annoying.

4. A different location for the play/pause button in Cover Flow mode.

The way I hold my iPhone while walking causes my little finger to hit the button all the time. Yeah yeah, I would like cheese with my whine.

5. The option for continuous playback of podcasts.

I listen to lots of short podcasts and it’d be nice to play them back to back without building another playlist.

6. .net, .org, and .edu as additional shortcuts if you hold .com down on the keyboard.

The precedent has been set, after all. Hold down certain letters, like ‘N’, and you get alternate letters. Why can’t we have this for .com?

7. A cache for maps and YouTube.

I don’t care so much about browser cache. I do care about map caching. I wish it would proactively grab the maps it needs to complete a trip to cut down on fetching delays later, especially since I usually program the route while I’m still on high-speed wireless. It would also be nice if it could cache some YouTube videos, since I generally show the same couple of videos to different people throughout a day.

8. The ability to sync the calendar with an HTTP iCal source.

Where I work we use the Oracle Collaboration Suite for calendaring, and a coworker wrote an iCal interface to it. Since iTunes only seems to want to work with Outlook I export my calendar as an iCal file, import it into Outlook, then sync. Every day. Ugh. I just want to point the calendar at the iCal source and know where I’m supposed to be.

9. An LED flashlight.

Since people call cell phones and PDAs “$500 flashlights” anyhow why not make the Apple logo light up as both a flash for the camera and as a flashlight?