Finally I also own an iPhone now. I ordered this on Aug 22nd and has the phone in my hand by 24th morning 10AM with the default free shipping. Good and fast shipping service from Apple. I used to think Dell used to ship the products asap if they are in stock, and looks like apple is also doing in the same way.

I enabled it using iTunes with another 2-year contract with Cingular with extra 20$ for the unlimited data plan. The phone is real surprise to me in terms of features…very good design and break through technology and most importantly its user friendly.

I thought the following could have been a nice to have features in iPhone as I felt lacking of them is becoming hard to keep the iPhone as the replacement to the other phones (I used to have Cingular PDA 8125 and Blackberry 8700C):

Features that I really liked in iPhone: 

  • Light weight and cool UI interface
  • Easy navigation to most of the features like stocks, weather, maps
  • Safari browser with zoom in and out using two fingers
  • Screen scrolling using fingers
  • Phone and iTunes together
  • Video clarity is too good (especially when playing ipod videos or you-tube)
  • builtin Camera photo resolution and its clarity
  • Yahoo! mail interface without the need of pop interface

Features that are needed in iPhone for common use:

  • Copy and Paste functionality 
  • Built in AIM for Yahoo, AOL and MSN
  • Improve in the sound quality of the incoming voice, its very hard at times to hear other party and looks like other do not have any problem in hearing
  • The home button is not that sensitive in the unit that I got, some times I needed hard press.
  •  I noticed the safari browser often crashes and it immediately goes to home screen and you lost what you visiting. Could have been nice if they had a nice auto recovery of the last visited links
  • After I place a call, I never able to go back and end the call, automatically the screen is locked by that time.
  • Lack of flash support in the Safari is really a pain as we can not use all websites
  • Easy way to configuration to support the keyboard with both numbers and letters in one-dial pad.
  • Call Log history should have been with some more basic features like distinguishing incoming and outgoing calls along with the total time spent on each call
  • Separate TODO list or gadget
  • Safari setting to have the default home page (good that they provided a way to toggle between the Google and Yahoo search engine)
  • Speaker volume is pretty much limited, it should have been bit more louder
  • Maps feature should had a way to change from default Google to Yahoo and/or Map quest as Google maps often gives wrong routes.
  • Lack of remote connectivity tools like a shell or terminal, ssh, putty, VNC viewer and a remote RDP client
  • Maps is not  fully features (at least should had a way to re-route or finding a alternative way)
  • Way to integrate web-based exchange e-mails
  • Bulitin RSS reader could have been a great addition
  • Could have been nice if ipod had its own Album section instead of going to more and then selecting the albums.

Overall its really a cool toy to play and it mostly suites for day to day software engineers life.