I seriously don’t know if I’ll be able to avoid iPhone mania. Apple’s 20 minute guided tour must be 20 minutes of pure hell for other mobile phone vendors. The (apparent) elegance, intuitiveness and speed of the iPhone’s UI is entrancing. But, the rational side of my brain still wants a few things that will likely cause me to wait for the next major version:
- Voice recognition for dialing — I’d like to just be able to say, “call mom cell” as I can on my current RAZR V3
- Integrated GPS with the Google Maps application to provide real-time navigation capabilities
- A broader and more extensible set of file viewers. I don’t care about creating rich content on my iPhone, but it should be able to at least view all of the content generated by Apple’s iLife and iWork suites. So far, we’ve seen the iPhone view PDF and Word documents. What about Pages and Keynote?
- Native Microsoft Exchange integration — a total no-brainer
- A video camera on the front of the iPhone, so I can use video iChat (hi kids!)
I finally broke down and ordered a Blackberry through our corporate provider. My main driver for having a “smartphone” is for email and since we won’t have corporate support for the iPhone for a while, it’ll have to do.
Update: With the reasonable rate plans (I’m already an AT&T Wireless customer via Cingular) I don’t see any human way I’m going to resist getting an iPhone. I already get a discount on service and equipment (I doubt the equipment discount will apply to an iPhone) so my out-of-pocket expense may be pretty reasonable.
