Many people have said that they want the iPhone to have specific features found in other phones, such as IM or 3G. But Apple is known for taking a small set of features and making them perfect, rather than taking a large set of features and slapping them together haphazardly (compare iWork templates with Office templates). I thought about what the iPhone has and what I think other people would want it to have, and I made the following list:
(in no particular order)
- Exchange support without opening an IMAP port. Many people want to use their iPhones at work, but can't because their company uses exchange and IT refuses to open the IMAP port. If Apple builds an open-source implementation of the exchange protocol, that will be one less reason to prevent companies from buying iPhones in bulk.
- LDAP or Open Directory support for the iPhone's address book. Again, another corporate feature, but wouldn't it be great to be able to set an Open Directory or LDAP server that your company uses for employee registries and be able to use all of the Leopard Server features, and have the iPhone authenticate against that database for corporate websites.
- Mobile iChat. Wouldn't it be great to be able to IM friends, and possibly do voice chat from your iPhone. This will probably be fixed come February with the iPhone SDK, but it would be so cool for it to be designed by Apple, since it would look like SMS and iChat. If Apple designed it they would probably implement bonjour, something that other IM clients tend to lack.
You will probably notice that I did not mention 3G. That's because I think that ubiquitous standards are more important than fast standards; 3G is not everywhere that EDGE is, and if it is a choice for people being able to use iPhones in their area and fast speeds for select people, Apple would probably choose the customer-friendly one.
Technorati Tags: 3G, Apple, IM, iPhone, Mobile iChat, Mobile Telephony
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