iPhone, Six Months On.

Well, dear readers, it’s been six months since your humble blogger sat for hours in line, surrounded every 25-year-old male virgin in Baton Rouge (“Man, you’ve never played ‘Halo 4’?? Dude, it SO rocks!!”), just to possess an iPhone. Madness, you say? Perhaps. But I’m not saying that today. And neither is my wife, who now has one, too. Half a year later and the excitement that drove me to sit in that line has not diminished. I. Love. My. iPhone.

What I said about the iPhone earlier still stands (scroll down a bit), so I’m not going to repeat myself. Is it perfect? No. But nothing is. As a designer, I know that all design involves tradeoffs. The trick to a great design is to get the balance just right. And Steve Jobs and his bunch have done that. The iPhone is functional. The iPhone is intuitive. The iPhone is integrated. The iPhone is elegant. (Man, is it ever!) Renaissance Italian artist and architect Leon Battista Alberti defined beauty as ”the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole”. And by that standard the iPhone comes pretty darn close to the mark.

But there are a few things that can be added to truly meet Sr. Alberti’s mark. So, Mister Jobs, if you are listening here is Clifford’s “iWant” list:

1. EDGE. Cripes. What’s the point of owning a Porchse when the engine maxes out at 150 RPM? I know this is an ATT problem, but c’mon Steve; you got some clout with the suits. Lean on ‘em.
2. Data access. The ability to carry files, like Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and open and edit them.
3. Copy and Paste. The usefulness of this core(!) Apple function cannot be overstated.
4. Calendar. Allow the use of label colors and the ability to set “private” entries like Outlook does. (My calendar is networked, so others in the office see it. They do not need to know about the romantic dinner for my wife.)
5. Maps. Only complaint is the speed. It needs to be faster.
6. Calculator. A ‘clear entry’ button. (It could be the current ‘clear’ button; press once for ‘clear entry’, twice for ‘clear all’. Because of what I do, a ‘square root’ function would also be nice.
7. Portrait to Landscape Mode. This needs to be available to more functions, like mail. Not just for the Web, CoverFlow, and mail attachments.
8. File Recognation. The iPhone needs the ability to open more attachments, like .WAV files amd FLASH files.
9. Games. First-person-time-wasting is critical to the success of any phone nowadays. While the web-based stuff is nice, if I’m sitting in a waiting room with bad reception, I got nothing to do. No web access, no games. Grrr. So please, Steve, let them be native. Please. There could be a single ‘games’ button, like the ‘calendar’ or ‘clock’ button, and the games one uploads to the phone would be listed there. That would keep the home screen tidy.
10. Headphone jack. A decent adapter to allow the use of other headphones. My wife wants to use her older (Bose) headphones, but that semi-rigid post the Apple Store used to sell is useless.